Referees Are Not Allowed to Guess: When the Screen Shows Nothing

At three in the morning on December 2, 2026, I sat in front of an old laptop in a small apartment in District 1, Saigon, cutting frame by frame from the Japan versus Spain match. In the 51st minute, Ao Tanaka scored. The whole world argued over a single question: had the ball gone out of play before Kaoru Mitoma crossed it? I zoomed into the original frame, drew a horizontal line along the goal line, measured it four times, and filed the piece at 3 a.m. The final number: 1.88 millimetres. The ball was still in play. A large fan page shared it, and six hours later the article had 12,000 interactions. That night, the community called me the eye of VAR in Saigon.

But what has troubled me most is not the night I could see. It is the nights when I could see nothing at all.

Inside the VAR room there is a silence that spectators never hear. It is the moment when the officials rewind and rewind a contact, then conclude: the footage is not enough. No angle is clear. No frame proves it. And yet outside, thousands of people already have their verdict.

From an article with 40 views

I began following VAR in June 2026, when the World Cup in Russia used the technology for the first time. On June 16, 2026, in the France versus Australia match, in the 55th minute, a referee used VAR to confirm a penalty for France for the first time in World Cup history. Antoine Griezmann scored from the spot. I was 17 that day, a schoolboy in Saigon, awake all night, writing the first article of my life about Law 12. It got 40 views. My friends said I wrote like a textbook.

I understood something: fans do not need the rulebook. They need a decision.

But it is the rulebook that actually changes the match. In 2026, VAR officially entered the V-League. Since then, every round has been a new argument. Some rounds, three incidents inside the box, three different decisions, three waves of outrage. Some rounds, a referee changes his mind after looking at the monitor, and that reversal is attacked harder than the original call.

In April 2026, when global football paused for COVID-19, I opened a Facebook group called the Saigon VAR Society. Every week I picked a controversial incident, clipped the video from television, and invited members to vote penalty or no penalty. After three months, the group reached 5,000 members. Five thousand members, one old screen, and a belief split into five thousand pieces.

Clear and obvious error is an ambiguous clause

The core principle of VAR sounds precise: it intervenes only for a clear and obvious error, or for a missed serious incident. But after sitting long enough with the footage, I know that clear and obvious are not objective words. They depend on where you stand, at what speed you watch, and what you believe before you switch the monitor on.

In football, we have at least twenty cameras to argue with. In combat sports, we have only three human beings.

This is the difference few viewers notice. In football, the referee is allowed to stop the match, open the monitor, review, and then decide. In boxing, each judge must score the moment the round ends, with no monitor, no slow motion, no chance to correct. The 10-point must system forces them to decide in an instant, based on memory and instinct. In MMA, three judges sit at three different sides, and each may see an entirely different fight.

In Vietnam, combat sports have no tool equivalent to VAR. Tournaments still rely entirely on on-site judging. That means every dispute over scoring ends with a feeling, not with evidence.

Which means that in combat sports, clear error often does not exist in the first place. It only becomes clear after the fight is over, once we have had time to cut frames and rewind. By then the judge is already locked into the moment.

That explains why disputes in combat sports are more existential than in football. A wrong penalty in the 90th minute can be fixed by VAR. A wrong scorecard in the fifth round cannot be fixed by anything. No clause in the rules allows a judge to review tape after the fight ends. The error, if there is one, goes straight into history.

What the main screen does not capture

There is a detail I learned after years of sitting close to the mat: the camera angle never matches the referee's angle. The camera sits high and looks down. The referee stands at eye level and looks straight at the point of contact. In a contact on the mat, the difference between a touch and a strike is only a few degrees of wrist rotation, and the overhead camera routinely misses it.

That is why I never conclude from a single angle. I need at least three angles, plus the original frame rate. If it is not enough, I write the truth: there is not enough data to conclude.

It sounds simple. But during a match, nobody wants to hear that.

The night I betrayed myself

On July 7, 2026, the Euro semi-final between England and Denmark. In the 104th minute, Raheem Sterling went down in the box. I reviewed the tape, saw only a light touch, and concluded: not enough evidence for a penalty. Twenty minutes later, hundreds of objections poured in. I panicked and edited the piece to maybe it was a penalty. When UEFA confirmed the original decision was correct, I was mocked: thought you were the eye of VAR, turns out you are the eye of the trend.

That semi-final night, I betrayed my own belief to embrace my heart.

That shock taught me something no classroom taught: community pressure is stronger than the pressure of data. A referee can see the truth, but if five thousand people all see the opposite, he begins to doubt his own eyes.

Since then, I split every article into two separate parts. The first is what the rules say, based on the FIFA text. The second is the fan perception, recording social media reaction. I do not blend the two, and I do not change my view simply because it was opposed.

What worries me most is not being wrong, but being certain

The paradox of this profession is that fans reward certainty, even when that certainty is wrong. An article that dares to assert always gets shared more than one that dares to say I do not have enough data. Decisiveness feels reassuring; hesitation feels weak.

But inside the VAR room, hesitation is discipline. A referee who dares to say I cannot see enough is protecting the match from an error that cannot be undone. A referee who is always certain, right or wrong, is putting his own ego above the outcome of the game.

I used to think the most important reform was more cameras. Now I think differently. What we need is not more eyes, but the courage to speak up when the eyes are not enough.

Closing

The referee blows the whistle, but the fans are the ones who give the final score. I see what no one else sees, and I have to live with it every day. If one day spectators accept that not enough evidence is also a correct answer, then perhaps we will not need more technology. We already have enough. What we still lack is the calm to look at an empty screen and not invent something inside it.