The media cycle following Erling Haaland’s decisive winner in the Manchester derby followed a depressingly predictable script. Pundits fumed, managers cried foul, and Pro Ref issued their mandatory, sterile mea culpa admitting an "error of judgment". The internet erupted into choruses of how video technology is ruining football, destroying the soul of the sport, and turning every goal into a forensic math exam.
Save the theatrics. The outrage is entirely misplaced.
The problem during that match at Old Trafford was never video review technology. The problem was a terrifying display of cognitive tunnel vision by human officials who managed to unlearn the rulebook in real-time. We do not have a technology crisis in modern football. We have a competency crisis sitting in Stockley Park, and pretending that scrapping review screens will solve institutional incompetence is the most lazy consensus in sports journalism.
The Anatomy of a Collective Brain Fade
Let us look at what actually happened during that sequence. Michael Oliver’s assistant raised the flag for offside against Erling Haaland. Correct protocol dictated a review. The video assistant referee, Matt Donohue, and his team locked onto the singular objective of checking whether Haaland was behind the defensive line when the ball was played. They found he was onside. Case closed, or so their malfunctioning brains concluded.
In their rush to restart play and justify a quick decision, they completely ignored the elephant in the penalty box: Enzo Fernández. Fernández was standing in an offside position, actively lunging for the ball, and drastically altering the defensive geometry for Manchester United’s backline and goalkeeper.
The rulebook is not ambiguous here. Under the laws of the game, a player in an offside position is penalized if they clearly attempt to play a ball close to them when it impacts an opponent, or make an obvious action that affects an opponent's ability to play the ball. Fernández checked every single one of those boxes.
Yet, the officiating crew suffered from acute institutional amnesia. They answered a multiple-choice question by writing their favorite color. They checked Haaland, cleared him, and completely forgot that football matches involve more than one attacking player on the pitch. When Pro Ref stood those officials down, it wasn't because video assistant refereeing failed; it was because two professionals failed basic operational awareness.
The Lazy Consensus Against Technology
Whenever a contentious call happens, the Luddite faction of football commentary crawls out of the woodwork to demand a return to pure, unadulterated human error. They argue that refereeing mistakes used to be "part of the game" and that VAR sucks the joy out of celebrating goals.
This is romanticized nonsense.
Before video review, clubs lost millions of pounds, managers lost their jobs, and entire seasons were derailed by referees who missed blatant offsides because their view was blocked by a defender's shoulder. Fans do not hate video review; fans hate when humans mismanage it. Blaming the monitor for a referee refusing to look at the right thing is like blaming a calculator because you forgot how to do long division.
Imagine a corporate scenario where an automated fraud-detection software flags a transaction, but the auditor only checks the first digit of the account number, waves it through, and ignores a blaring red alert for identity theft. You wouldn't throw the software in the trash. You would fire the auditor for gross negligence.
Football culture bends over backwards to coddle referees. We treat them like fragile artists whose feelings might be hurt if we hold them to rigorous standards. Until the sport starts treating officiating errors with the same operational severity as a pilot missing a checklist, nothing will change.
Why Unchecked Human Judgment Is Costlier
The alternative to structured reviews is returning to a state of nature where subjective refereeing reigns supreme unchecked. But let us look at the data of human error prior to implementation. Referees miss up to thirty percent of tight offside decisions in high-speed phases of play when relying solely on naked human eyes.
When you strip away the screen, you are not returning to fairness; you are returning to a lottery where the biggest clubs with the loudest psychological pressure on officials get the benefit of the doubt. Technology acts as the great equalizer. It takes subjective bias and forces a concrete look. When the humans running the tools refuse to execute the protocols, the tool didn't fail—the operator did.
Michael Carrick had every right to be furious after the match. His team was victims of an officiating crew that treated a multi-layered rulebook like a single-choice checklist. But turning this into an indictment of video technology misses the forest for the trees.
Stop asking whether we should dismantle review systems. Start demanding that the people sitting in the replay booth possess the cognitive capacity to look at more than one player at a time. Until we hold referees accountable to elite performance standards, we will keep reliving the same groundhog day of apologies, suspensions, and manufactured controversies.
