In an analysis of video-assisted, pitch-side review of soccer (UK football) referee calls in the English Premier League, referees overturned their original call 95 percent of the time. However, these decisions had no statistical link to crowd size, the score or quarter when the call was made, or whether the call was regarding the home versus away team. Daniel Walker of the University of Bradford, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on April 15, 2026.
The Video Assistant Referee (VAR) protocol allows referees to overturn certain calls during a match after consulting replay footage on a pitch-side monitor. Evidence suggests that the VAR protocol has boosted call accuracy, but it has received criticisms, such as concerns over consistency and impact on fan enjoyment.
Prior research suggests that certain external factors, such as which team is the home team, can influence some referee decisions during a match. However, whether such factors are at play in VAR-protocol decision making has been unclear. To help clarify, Walker and colleagues analyzed VAR decisions across 1,520 English Premier League matches spanning four recent seasons. In this time, referees were advised to review their calls using the pitch-side monitor 250 times, and 95 percent of original calls were overturned after review.
The analysis showed that neither the odds of post-review overturn of a call, nor the decision to review a call in the first place, had any statistical link to crowd size, the score or quarter when the call was made, or whether the call was regarding the home versus away team. VAR-protocol decision making also appeared to be consistent from season to season.
Of the small number of calls maintained after VAR review, most were related to the home team, but the sample size was too small to determine whether this was merely coincidental. Nonetheless, the researchers outline the possibility that the proximity of the pitch-side monitor to home-team fans could bias video review decision making. To reduce this possibility, they suggest, the monitor could be relocated away from the pitch, but the referee could still be recorded during the review process for transparency.
Walker adds: "Our study is the first to evidence the prevalence of decision making during the VAR protocol, whether that is overturning or maintaining decisions. We found that referees overturn their decisions 95% of the time when at the monitor. This is in-part due to the reason they are being sent to the monitor is due to a potential error. Interestingly, maintain decisions were more prevalent when related to the home team, which could be due to the location of the pitch-side monitor often positioned in front of home supporters. Moving the monitor to inside the tunnel, away from supporters but still televised may be a sensible compromise."
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4dSZtfO
Citation: Walker D, Staniforth CE, Thomas J, Parker F, Khizar U, Lawton NJ, et al. (2026) Psychology at the screen: Investigating the current VAR protocol. PLoS One 21(4): e0345704. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0345704
Author countries: U.K.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
