A goal used to be an immediate reaction. The ball went in, the body jumped, the throat screamed, and the celebration arrived before thought did. Today, the ball goes in, but the fan looks at the referee. On the screen appears a phrase that’s now part of modern football: VAR Review. And in that instant, the goal stops being an emotion. It becomes a wait.
The case isn’t Colombia. The case is all of us.
The goal disallowed for Colombia against Portugal for a razor-thin offside works as a perfect scene to understand the problem: a country goes from euphoria to frustration over an almost invisible detail. But this isn’t an article about a match. It’s an article about a new behavior.
VAR is teaching the fan not to celebrate immediately. It’s replacing a natural reaction with a conditioned one. Before, the body responded to the goal. Now the body waits for authorization. That change seems small, but it’s enormous. Because football isn’t just a sport of rules: it’s an emotional system. And when you alter the most important moment of that system —the goal— you alter the entire experience.
The data shows this isn’t an isolated annoyance
Criticism of VAR isn’t explained only by fans frustrated after a loss. A Football Supporters’ Association survey published in 2026 found that 91.7% of fans believe VAR has eliminated the spontaneous joy of celebrating goals. Only 3.3% said the in-stadium experience is better with VAR. In addition, 58% wanted to keep referee announcements in the stadium and 47.2% supported a limited per-match challenge system.
YouGov found in May 2026 that 59% of Premier League fans think VAR works badly, versus 26% who think it works well. 72% of regular viewers feel it has made matches less enjoyable. And yet, only 18% want to remove it entirely, while 68% prefer to keep it, but with changes.
“Fans aren’t asking to return to error; they’re asking to redesign the experience.”
Celebration is no longer free
The deepest change doesn’t happen on the screen. It happens in the user’s body. Before, the emotional sequence was simple: tension → attack → goal → scream → embrace → memory.
Now the sequence fragmented: tension → attack → goal → doubt → review → wait → anxiety → decision. VAR introduced a pause right at the highest point of emotion. And when an emotion is paused, it doesn’t come back the same. Even if the goal ends up validated, the first explosion is already lost: the celebration arrives late, the collective energy cools, the embrace no longer springs from instinct but from an external confirmation.
Football became more exact, but less spontaneous
The great argument in favor of VAR is precision, and it’s true: some research indicates that refereeing accuracy can go from roughly 92.1% to 98.3% with its implementation. But in user experience there’s an uncomfortable truth:
“A solution can be technically correct and emotionally damaging.”
The system improves one metric —refereeing accuracy— but affects others just as important: spontaneity, rhythm, trust, clarity, celebration, and emotional continuity. Football lives a paradox: it can be more correct and feel worse.
The problem isn’t the technology. It’s the design of the interruption.
Goal-line technology generates almost no rejection because it responds fast, is clear, and doesn’t break the emotional flow: the ball is in or it’s out. VAR, by contrast, often feels like a black box. The fan doesn’t always know what’s being reviewed, how long is left, what the criterion is, or why a frozen image changes everything they just felt.
That’s where the real problem appears: interruption without explanation becomes frustration. In UX, when a system stops the user at the moment of greatest intent, it must offer immediate clarity. If it doesn’t, the wait turns into anxiety. And in football that anxiety multiplies, because you’re not waiting for just anything: you’re waiting for the validation of a collective emotion.
VAR changed spectator behavior
During a review, the user no longer just stares at the TV. They grab their phone, open social media, look for the replay, read comments, check memes, message the WhatsApp group, read journalists, hunt for someone to blame. Attention fragments.
VAR doesn’t just pause the game: it opens a parallel conversation. While the referee reviews, social media judges. The experience stops being linear. We no longer simply watch a match: we live an ecosystem of tension distributed across pitch, television, social media, chats, commentators, and algorithms.
Tension on social media confirms the emotional impact
A study published in PLOS ONE analyzed 643,251 tweets from 129 Premier League matches, including 94 VAR incidents. VAR-related tweets carried a more negative emotional charge than the rest, and that impact could extend after the play.
VAR doesn’t just interrupt a moment: it can emotionally contaminate the rest of the experience. The user doesn’t return to the match right away; they stay trapped in the controversy, the sense of injustice, or the doubt about the system. That makes it something more than a refereeing tool: a trigger of social conversation, frustration, and polarization.
Doubt became part of the product
Football always had controversy. But before, the controversy came after the play. Now it appears inside the play. The goal no longer ends when the ball goes in: it ends when the system approves it.
That transforms the fan’s psychology. They learn not to fully trust what they saw, that their first emotion can be invalidated, that celebrating too soon can turn into embarrassment. Over time, they celebrate less intensely, wait more, suspect sooner, look at the referee before their teammate. VAR installed a new emotion in football: defensive celebration.
The fan isn’t waiting for a decision. They’re waiting for justice.
The VAR wait isn’t neutral. When a person waits for an app to load, they get impatient. But when they wait for their country’s goal to be confirmed, the wait touches something deeper: identity, belonging, memory, and justice. When a play is decided by invisible millimeters, a fracture appears between two kinds of justice:
- Technical justice: the line says he was offside.
- Perceived justice: that difference didn’t look like a real advantage.
That’s where much of the rejection is born. The user doesn’t always feel the technology did justice. Sometimes they feel the technology found an excuse.
The fan’s body also plays the match
Sporting emotion isn’t an opinion: it’s a physical response. A study published in Scientific Reports collected smartwatch data from 229 fans over about 12 weeks. Stress was roughly 41% higher on match day versus normal days, and average heart rate was higher for those in the stadium.
A review doesn’t interrupt just a broadcast: it interrupts a physiological activation. The body was ready to discharge emotion, but the system asks it to wait. It’s like stopping a wave right before it breaks. That’s why the experience feels so unnatural: the goal is emotionally designed to be immediate, not to be administered.
What this phenomenon teaches about human behavior
The user doesn’t evaluate an experience by the final result alone. They evaluate the emotional path they had to travel to reach that result. That’s why a correct decision can feel unfair if:
- it arrives late,
- it isn’t understood,
- it interrupts too much,
- it contradicts the user’s perception,
- it doesn’t explain its criterion,
- it punishes something that seems insignificant,
- it breaks a high-value emotional moment.
The same principle applies to a financial app that blocks an account, an education platform that cancels progress, an AI that rejects a request without explaining, or a healthcare system that forces you to repeat a process. The lesson is clear: technology shouldn’t just solve problems; it must care for the user’s emotional state while solving them.
“When technology obsesses over being right, it can forget how it feels to use it.”
What football should learn
The future shouldn’t be football without technology, but football with better experience design. Well-applied technology should meet five principles:
- Intervene less: if the error isn’t clear, evident, and relevant, the experience should continue.
- Explain better: the fan needs to know what’s being reviewed, why, and under what criterion.
- Respect emotional timing: emotion has a short window; if the review arrives late, the experience is already broken.
- Measure emotional impact: not just goals and possession, but also frustration, comprehension, trust, and lost celebration.
- Protect the goal: it’s the emotional peak of the football product; any technology that touches it must do so with maximum care.
Conclusion: when celebrating needs permission
VAR shows one of the most important tensions of our era: the one between technological precision and human experience. On paper, technology promises justice; in practice, it often introduces waiting, suspicion, and frustration. The goal, which used to be an immediate explosion, can now become a question.
And when the most exciting moment of football turns into an administrative pause, something deep breaks: trust in the first emotion, collective synchrony, the freedom to celebrate. Maybe the great challenge of modern football isn’t to make technology see more, but to make it understand better what can’t be easily measured: the scream, the embrace, the wait, the rage, the hope, and that small window where a goal stops being a play and becomes memory.
— By Christian Benavides, CEO of MediaLab Ingeniería.