Roberto Rosetti wants use of technology for microscopic calls scrapped
Uefa Director for Referees Roberto Rosetti has laid into the media for “playing a part” in the excessive use of the video assistant referee.
VAR has been widely criticised this season for various officiating errors and for overly delaying the game. In the FA Cup game between Bournemouth and Wolves in March 2025 it took VAR up to eight minutes to decide on an offside decision.
That timescale was nearly matched this week in a Copa del Rey game between Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, where officials took over seven minutes to decide whether or not Robert Lewandowski’s heel had been offside in the build up to Pau Cubarsi’s goal.
VAR has particularly been criticised for making offside calls where the margin is barely visible to the naked eye, which is far from the reason the offside rule was introduced in the first place.
“You are guilty in some way, because also you pushed for more interventions,” Rosetti told reporters. “‘Where is VAR? Why doesn’t VAR intervene? Why is VAR not involved? What are the VARs doing?’ But now we need to be careful about that.”
However, the Uefa official admitted that the use of the technology for the tiniest possible checks should be scrapped.
“Eight years ago, I came to London and we discussed what VAR stands for,” said Rosetti. “We spoke about clear mistakes, because technology works so well in factual decisions. In objective decisions, it is fantastic.
“Subjective evaluation is more difficult. That’s why we started to speak about clear and obvious mistakes: clear evidence. I believe that we need to speak about this again in our meetings at the end of the season.
“We cannot go in this direction of microscopic VAR intervention. We love football like it is.”
