Andy Burnham has called for the outright ban of Video Assistant Referees (VAR), describing the technology as a “killer of spontaneity” that has stripped the joy from watching football live.
The Mayor of Greater Manchester and Labour leadership hopeful, who is also standing as the party’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election, made his position clear in an interview with ITV News. “Gone. Get rid,” he said when asked whether VAR should remain in the game. “I’ll tell you why. It’s killing spontaneity in the ground.”
Burnham, a self-proclaimed Everton season ticket holder, expanded on the visceral effect VAR has had on matchday atmosphere. “You can’t celebrate a goal because you think someone somewhere in an industrial unit is going to rule it out,” he said. For him, the technology has removed the raw, immediate release that makes football spectating unique.
But his opposition runs deeper than a lost roar. Burnham argued that the system fundamentally fails in its stated purpose. “Number two, it doesn’t get decisions right,” he said. “You could put up with it if it then got decisions right, but it doesn’t get the decisions right, and it’s not consistent. It takes a decision one week for one favoured team and then doesn’t do the same thing the next.”
His critique echoes widespread disenchantment among fans. A recent Ipsos survey found that half of English football supporters believe VAR has had a negative impact on the match-going experience, with older fans particularly disaffected. The Football Supporters’ Association went further, polling that 91% of fans believe football is better off without VAR, while 82% would prefer to watch matches without the technology. Fans surveyed cited delayed decisions and the removal of spontaneous joy from goal celebrations as primary grievances, matching Burnham’s own testimony.
Burnham’s scepticism about the consistency of VAR decisions is shared by one of the Premier League’s most successful managers. Pep Guardiola has admitted he has “never” fully trusted refereeing decisions during his time in English football, describing VAR as little more than a “flip of a coin”.
Guardiola pointed to past FA Cup final defeats as evidence. “We lost the two finals of the FA Cup because the referees didn’t do their jobs as they should do, even the VAR,” the Manchester City boss said. He argued that clubs cannot rely on the technology to deliver justice. “When this happens, it is because we have to do better, not blame the referees or VAR.”
Guardiola’s frustration extends to the apparent inconsistency of what is penalised. “There’s so much pulling, shoving and pushing that never gets given, so to give this one in such a big game – irrespective of how you look back at it – is a scandal,” he said of a specific incident. Summing up his long-standing view, he added: “I never trust anything since I arrived a long time ago. Always I learned you have to do it better, be in a position to do it better because VAR is a flip of a coin.”
VAR has been a feature of the Premier League since the 2019/20 season, after clubs voted unanimously in November 2018 to adopt the technology. The system was introduced to minimise human error. Official statistics show that the rate of correct key match decisions rose from 82% before VAR to 94% in its debut season. Despite that improvement, implementation has been mired in controversy.
Critics point to the disruption of the game’s flow: some matches now average over 100 minutes because of lengthy reviews. The lack of transparency, with referees’ conversations with VAR officials kept private, has also fuelled mistrust. Burnham himself called for VAR to be suspended by the Football Association as far back as October 2019, labelling it a “nitpickers’ charter”.
The technology has not spread uniformly across the English leagues. It remains exclusive to the Premier League, and when a stripped-down alternative was put to Championship clubs, the response was emphatically negative. At the English Football League’s annual gathering last month, professional game match officials presented a streamlined system called Football Video Support (FVS), which would have allowed managers two video reviews per match. Following consultation, opposition to any form of video review technology proved overwhelming.
EFL clubs rejected the proposal for the upcoming 2026/27 season, with many wary of the impact on supporter experience. Some grounds also lack the necessary infrastructure for VAR. Burnham, who has consistently criticised the technology, has also been a vocal opponent of the Premier League’s handling of Everton’s points deduction, accusing the league of “regulatory malpractice” and “abuse of process” in written exchanges with chair Alison Brittain – actions he took in his capacity as an Everton season ticket holder.
