After the debut of video assistant referees at last summer’s 2018 FIFA World Cup, soccer’s European governing body, UEFA, is now fully embracing the technology. UEFA will implement VAR starting in August 2019 with the UEFA Super Cup. VAR will then feature in the 2019/20 Champions League, the 2020 European Championship, the 2020/21 Europa League, and the 2021 UEFA Nations League Finals.
Members of the UEFA Executive Committee met Thursday morning in Nylon, Switzerland, to make the decision. UEFA had previously only planned to use VAR at next year’s Super Cup, with further roll out only tentative. At this year’s World Cup, VAR was used to help ensure referees made correct decisions in pivotal calls such as awarding goals, penalty kicks, and red cards.
“We are confident that introducing Video Assistant Referees in August 2019 will give us enough time to put in place a robust system and to train match officials to ensure an efficient and successful implementation of VAR in the UEFA Champions League, the world’s flagship club competition,” said UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin in a statement on Thursday.
Čeferin previously had indicated that he did not believe UEFA was ready to adopt VAR. “I don’t know where it came from, but we haven’t talked about it and I’m still not convinced about VAR,” he said in August, according to Slovenian media outlet Ekipa. “What things do the referees see and what don’t they see? Things are still unclear, but we know that one day it’ll be necessary to use it.”
Despite Čeferin’s initial skepticism, VAR’s UEFA Champions League debut will occur Aug. 14, 2019 at the Super Cup held in Istanbul. The match will feature the winners of the 2018/19 Champions League and Europa League.
SportTechie Takeaway
UEFA’s debut of VAR will occur 14 months after FIFA introduced the technology at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. That tournament featured the most penalty kicks ever recorded at a World Cup. Nonetheless, the video assistant referee experiment was viewed as a success. However the Royal Moroccan Football Federation wrote a letter of complaint to FIFA, arguing that VAR was not used fairly. The technology was also used for the first time this past season in Bundesliga, the premier German soccer league, where a couple teams were disappointed with how VAR impacted key points of the game.