VAR and the 'Clear and Obvious' Standard: When the Law Blindfolds Itself Before World Cup 2026

Minute 104, Wembley, Euro 2026 semi-final. Raheem Sterling went down inside the box after a shoulder challenge from Joakim Maehle. Dutch referee Danny Makkelie pointed to the spot without taking his eyes off the pitch, without consulting the pitch-side monitor, without letting VAR intervene. Harry Kane's kick was saved by Kasper Schmeichel, then he converted the rebound. England reached the final. Denmark went home. The continent split in two, and for the next twenty-four hours, I — then a first-year staffer at a sports broadcaster in Nagoya — sat alone defending a point none of my colleagues would hear: under the "clear and obvious error" standard, Makkelie was entitled to keep his original decision, because any error was not clear enough to overturn. I retell this not to reopen Denmark's wound. I retell it because it is the cleanest example of what I have pursued for twelve years: how power is encoded in wording that spectators never read. Football law has a linguistic layer television never broadcasts. When IFAB drafts the Laws of the Game, they do not write "the referee must whistle when he sees a foul". They write in open phrases like "careless, reckless, excessive force", or closed ones like "clear and obvious error". Every such phrase is a door the lawmaker deliberately leaves ajar, because football cannot operate on hard definitions. In 2026, in Kazan, France versus Australia, minute 58, Uruguayan referee Andrés Cunha jogged to the pitch-side monitor, reviewed the incident, then pointed to the spot. Antoine Griezmann converted. It was the first penalty in World Cup history awarded by VAR. I was twenty then, a sociology student in Nagoya, and I recorded the entire consultation sequence — not to judge right or wrong, but to understand where power was shifting from and to. My three-thousand-word piece ran on an emerging sports platform and was shared more than four thousand times in two days. What I learned from Kazan was not in the penalty. It was in the silence before Cunha decided. Inside that silence, a system of cameras, the VAR team, monitors and a man standing twenty metres away were negotiating with each other about what the truth was. When COVID-19 swept Europe, global football froze. The 2026/21 Premier League season ended with forty penalties — the most in the competition's history to that point — and most of them came from IFAB's new handball rule, issued with the intent of simplifying how handball was identified. I was temporarily out of work then, sitting in a Nagoya apartment, and instead of worrying about my contract, I downloaded the entire Opta dataset on forty-seven handball incidents penalised that season. I coded each incident along three variables: the ball's contact angle relative to the body axis, the arm's position relative to the shoulder, and the distance from the contact point to the edge of the penalty area. The work took three weeks. The result made me stop. Referees were not penalising based on intent — which the law still declares central. They were penalising based on something else: whether the arm sat outside the "natural silhouette of the body". The problem is that the Laws of the Game never define the "natural silhouette of the body". The phrase exists in referees' heads, in UEFA training sessions, in internal instructional videos — but not in the written law anyone can read. This discovery brought me into the international referee-research community. Not because it was shocking. But because it revealed a clear pattern: when law tries to model the human body through abstract language, it is forced to leave gaps, and those gaps are always filled by something unwritten. In that same season, IFAB amended the handball rule three times. The first tightened the definition. The second loosened it for deflections off a teammate's leg. The third added an exception for arms in a supporting position during a fall. Each amendment was an admission that the previous one was wrong. Three times in twelve months. As a sociologist, I see a familiar phenomenon: an organisation trying to define a concept by endlessly redefining it, without ever touching the root question — whether a human arm, at sprinting pace, can sit within any "natural silhouette" at all. The physicist would say no. The biomechanist would say no. But the lawmaker does not ask them. Based on my experience covering major tournaments, every time a competition enters the knockout rounds, the number of handball incidents sent to VAR multiplies — not because players handle the ball more, but because result pressure puts every box incident under the microscope. This is where I must say what most fans do not want to hear: VAR does not make football fairer. It makes football more transparent — and transparent and fair are two different things. When goal-line technology arrived, it settled a binary question: did the ball cross the line or not. No room for interpretation. When VAR arrived, it promised the same, but applied it to questions that are anything but binary: is the arm natural, is the contact strong enough, is the error "clear and obvious". Technology sharpens the image, but the image does not answer those questions. It only makes people argue more fiercely about the same incident. The phrase "clear and obvious" is the perfect example of what I call the language that disguises power. It sounds like a strict standard. In practice it is an open door for helplessness. When a referee keeps his decision on an incident ten million viewers see as wrong, he is not defending the truth. He is saying the law has not given him the language to express what those ten million are seeing. I remember a veteran editor who recognised my unusual rigour after the Wembley night and invited me to write a regular column on the laws. He said something I have kept since: "You are not defending referees. You are defending the system that produced them — and pointing out where that system falls short." He was right. I do not hunt referees who err. I hunt designs that err. World Cup 2026 is arriving with thirty-two teams and an upgraded VAR system: more cameras, a semi-automated offside algorithm, and a communication protocol between referees and stadium spectators. These improvements are real. They will reduce technical errors. But they do not touch the root problem. As long as concepts like the "natural silhouette of the body" exist in the referee's head but not in the written law, Wembley nights will keep coming. My proposal is concrete: IFAB should publish its internal operating standards — the training videos referees watch, the phrases they are taught to recognise an incident. When spectators read the same book as referees, the argument shifts from "was he right or wrong" to "is this standard reasonable". That is a better argument — and the only one that can move football forward.