History of World Cup VAR technology

The first video referral in World Cup history happened during the Group B opener between Spain and Portugal, in Sochi. In the 24th minute, Spanish striker Diego Costa clattered against defender Pepe, elbowing him in the face. The defender fell to the ground and, in the sequence of the play, Costa sent the ball into the corner of the net. As Spain celebrated equalising the match at 1-1, referee Gianluca Rocchi consulted the video assistant referee (VAR) using his headset, asking if he had seen anything wrong with the play. The VAR, who at the time was sitting in a video operations room in Moscow, 1,620km away from the action, replied that all was OK. The goal was allowed to stand.

"It was a clear foul,” Fernando Santos, Portugal’s boss, said after the match. Even Spain's Diego Costa agreed: "I saw it afterwards. You could give a foul. It's the referee's interpretation." When asked about VAR, he added: "I don't like it… I scored a goal but I didn't know whether to celebrate or not. If there is a questionable part of the play, you don't celebrate. It can make you look stupid."

VAR was conceived as part of an ambitious project conducted by The Royal Netherlands Football Association (KNVB) called Refereeing 2.0. Its aim? To reinvent refereeing. "With all the 4G and Wi-Fi in stadia today, the referee is the only person who can’t see exactly what is happening and he’s actually the only one who should," says Lukas Brud, IFAB secretary at the International Football Association (IFAB). "We knew we had to protect referees from making mistakes that everyone can see immediately." One of the project’s first successes was the introduction of goal-line technology by FIFA in 2012, after a two-year trial conducted by KNVB. Thanks to that, at World Cup matches, referees are now instantly alerted when the ball completely crosses the line, via a technology developed by British tech company Hawk-Eye. (The same company widely adopted in professional tennis). “Soccer has always been very conservative when it came to the introduction of technology,” Brud says. “We knew that we are opening a very wide door and that if we started down this path, there would be no way back.”