This is the problem with VAR in one sentence: the people running it keep telling everyone they want football to stay at the centre, and yet too many of the reviews still feel like they are happening in a separate universe. Roberto Rosetti did not bother dressing that up last month. His complaint was blunt. Some VAR reviews, he said, were “not connected with football”. And if that sounds like a warning shot, that is because it is.
Rosetti, Uefa’s referees’ chief, has now launched Clear Line, a new push designed to show fans when VAR should and should not intervene. The idea is straightforward enough. The execution, as ever with VAR, is where the fight begins. Uefa wants a more uniform approach across the Premier League, the German Bundesliga, the Spanish La Liga, the Italian Serie A and the French Ligue 1. That is not a cosmetic project. It is an admission that the current mess is not working well enough.
The real issue is consistency
Last month, the lead referee officers from England, Spain, Germany, France and Italy met with Rosetti and David Elleray to talk through that very problem. The subject was not subtle: handball and the way it is interpreted from one competition to another. Last season showed the scale of the inconsistency. The Premier League had the lowest rate of VAR interventions in Europe, while handball penalties arrived every 17.27 games in the Premier League, every 10.93 games in the German Bundesliga, every 10.56 games in the Spanish La Liga, every 10.00 games in the Italian Serie A and every 9.27 games in the French Ligue 1.
That spread tells its own story. This is not a minor disagreement over a border-line clip. It is a structural problem. One league is being far more restrained than another, and the result is predictable: confusion, frustration and the growing sense that the same incident can produce very different outcomes depending on where it happens.
Rosetti’s language matters because he is not pretending otherwise. “We realise that everywhere now there is not any satisfaction about how VAR is impacting football,” he said. That is not the language of a system quietly doing its job. That is the language of administrators trying to stop the whole thing from drifting further away from the game it was meant to help.
Football, not PlayStation
His warning that Uefa wants to avoid “microscopic situations” went to the heart of the matter. “The context is super important. It’s football, not PlayStation,” Rosetti said, and that line cuts through the usual fog. VAR was sold as a tool for clear mistakes and clear situations. It was never supposed to become a machine for forensic obsession, pulling matches apart for the sake of tiny details that do little to improve the sport.
That is why Clear Line matters. If it works, fans will at least be able to see when intervention is supposed to happen and when it is not. If it does not, then Uefa will simply have produced a more polished explanation for the same old confusion. The principle is sound: “The referee must referee the match,” Rosetti said. But that only works if the technology is genuinely limited to helping with the obvious.
There is still no perfect answer here. Rosetti admitted as much, saying football is not perfect and that similar situations will continue to be interpreted differently. But the point is not to pretend the problem has vanished. It is to narrow the damage. Uefa’s line is that it is working together to be “more consistent in the application of the laws”. That is sensible. It is also overdue.
Rosetti officiated the Euro 2008 final, so he is hardly coming at this from the outside. He knows what elite refereeing looks like when it is trusted, and he also knows what happens when that trust starts to erode. Right now, the game is asking for something very basic: less interference, more consistency, and a system that remembers football is the product, not the lab experiment.
