When Was VAR Introduced in Football? A Timeline of the Video Assistant Referee

The Video Assistant Referee, almost always shortened to VAR, was first written into football's Laws of the Game by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in March 2018. Live testing in competitive matches, however, began earlier — September 2016 in the Netherlands — and the system was rolled out tournament by tournament and league by league over the second half of the decade. The full answer to "when was VAR introduced in football" is less a single date than a four-year migration from experiment to global standard.

The short answer in one paragraph

VAR was first trialled in a competitive senior match on 21 September 2016, in a Dutch KNVB Cup tie. It was used in a major FIFA tournament for the first time at the 2016 FIFA Club World Cup in Japan in December of that year. IFAB approved its inclusion in the Laws of the Game in March 2018. The 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia became the first World Cup to use it. Domestic adoption then followed in waves: the Bundesliga and Serie A in the 2017-18 season, La Liga and Ligue 1 in 2018-19, and the Premier League in 2019-20. The UEFA Champions League introduced it from the knockout rounds of the 2018-19 campaign.

The pre-history: why football resisted video review for so long

Other major sports adopted video review long before football did. Rugby union's Television Match Official system has been in use since the late 1990s, cricket's Decision Review System dates from 2008, and tennis introduced Hawk-Eye challenges in 2006.

Football held out for two intertwined reasons. The first was philosophical: FIFA, IFAB, and many national associations argued that part of the sport's universal character was its simplicity — any pitch, any referee, any whistle. The second was practical. Football is a continuous game without the natural stoppages of cricket or American football, and pausing play to review every contested decision seemed incompatible with its flow.

What changed minds was an accumulation of high-profile errors at major tournaments — disallowed goals, missed handballs, off-the-ball incidents — combined with broadcast technology that let every fan in a stadium check their phone before the referee could blow the next whistle. By the mid-2010s, the gap between what television showed and what the on-field referee saw had become a credibility problem.

The IFAB trial framework, 2016

IFAB, the body that writes football's rules, formally approved a two-year live experiment in March 2016 at its Annual General Meeting in Cardiff. The framework set out the basic shape that VAR still follows.

Reviewable incidents were restricted to four "match-changing" categories:

Goals and any infringement leading to them
Penalty decisions
Direct red card incidents (not second yellows)
Cases of mistaken identity when issuing cards

Everything else — fouls in midfield, throw-in decisions, normal yellow cards — remained the on-field referee's job and was not reviewable. The principle was deliberately conservative: video should correct clear and obvious errors on game-changing moments, not retrospectively officiate the whole match.

The first live trial: Netherlands, September 2016

The Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) was the first national body to put the trial framework into a competitive match. On 21 September 2016, in a KNVB Cup tie between Ajax and Willem II in Amsterdam, the off-field video official communicated with the referee for the first time in a real fixture. The Dutch league extended the test across the Eredivisie in subsequent seasons.

Parallel trials began in other federations within months. Major League Soccer in the United States, the A-League in Australia, and several Asian leagues all ran VAR experiments during the 2016 and 2017 calendar years. FIFA used these pilots to refine the protocol — particularly the communication between the video room and the referee, and the use of the pitchside review monitor.

The first FIFA tournament with VAR: Club World Cup 2016

FIFA pulled the system into a senior international tournament for the first time at the 2016 FIFA Club World Cup in Japan in December 2016. The competition produced the first VAR-decided penalty in a senior FIFA match, awarded in the semi-final between Kashima Antlers and Atlético Nacional. The result was, by most accounts, technically successful but cosmetically awkward: long delays, confused players, and a stadium audience who could not see what the referee was watching.

The 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup in Russia, six months later, was the second FIFA-organised trial. By the end of that tournament, FIFA had built enough confidence in the protocol to plan a full World Cup deployment for 2018.

The Bundesliga and Serie A move first, 2017-18

Two of Europe's top five leagues adopted VAR full-time before the system was written into the Laws of the Game. Both did so for the 2017-18 season.

The German Bundesliga went live with VAR from matchday one in August 2017. Italy's Serie A followed on the opening weekend of its 2017-18 season. Adoption in both leagues was bumpy. Inconsistent application, criticism from coaches, and confusion over offside-line drawing dominated the early months of coverage. Both leagues nonetheless persisted, and both refined their protocols across that first season.

The decision to go ahead before IFAB's final rule change reflected the trial framework's flexibility: federations could deploy VAR under the experimental protocol provided they followed IFAB's published procedures.

IFAB writes VAR into the Laws of the Game, March 2018

The decisive procedural step came at IFAB's AGM in Zurich on 3 March 2018. The board voted to incorporate VAR into the Laws of the Game as a permanent option, ending the experimental status. From the 2018-19 season onwards, any competition could adopt VAR under a unified set of rules.

The same meeting set out the formal categories of reviewable incidents that remain in force today, along with the requirement that the on-field referee retains final authority. VAR can recommend a review, identify a clear and obvious error, or flag a serious missed incident — but the referee on the pitch is still the only person who can change a decision.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup: VAR's global breakthrough

The 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, played in June and July, was the first World Cup to use the Video Assistant Referee. Across the 64-match tournament, VAR was active for every fixture. The opening-round usage included penalty awards that would almost certainly have been missed at previous tournaments — most visibly, several handball calls that the on-field referees acknowledged only after consulting the video team.

The World Cup mattered because it was the first time a global audience saw VAR applied consistently across an entire tournament. It also stress-tested the protocol against the highest-pressure environment in football: knockout matches, varied refereeing teams, and broadcast scrutiny in dozens of languages. Reactions were mixed but the system's basic credibility survived.

Domestic leagues follow, 2018-19 and 2019-20

After the World Cup, the rest of Europe's top tier moved quickly. La Liga in Spain and Ligue 1 in France both introduced VAR for their 2018-19 seasons. The English Premier League — the most-watched domestic league in the world — held back for one more year, citing the need for further protocol study, and finally adopted the system for the 2019-20 campaign.

UEFA followed a similar staggered pattern in its club competitions. The UEFA Champions League introduced VAR from the knockout round of the 2018-19 season, starting in February 2019. The UEFA Europa League added it from 2019-20 onwards, with the group stage falling under the protocol from 2020-21.

A consolidated league timeline reads:

2016-17: Eredivisie trial (Netherlands), MLS pilot, A-League pilot
2017-18: Bundesliga, Serie A full deployment
2018: 2018 FIFA World Cup; IFAB writes VAR into the Laws of the Game
2018-19: La Liga, Ligue 1, UEFA Champions League knockouts
2019-20: English Premier League, UEFA Europa League knockouts
2020-21: UEFA Europa League group stage; further continental adoption
2022: Semi-automated offside debuts at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar

What changed inside the game

VAR's arrival has had several measurable effects on senior football. Penalty awards rose sharply in the first seasons after adoption in most leagues, as previously missed handballs and box-area fouls were corrected after review. Disallowed goals — particularly for marginal offsides — also climbed. Both effects have moderated as players, coaches, and broadcasters adapted to the new threshold for "clear and obvious".

Match length grew, though less than critics expected. Most published data suggests the average top-flight match runs roughly one to three minutes longer than its pre-VAR equivalent, with individual reviews ranging from under thirty seconds to several minutes for complex incidents.

Refereeing itself has been quietly reshaped. The role of the on-field referee shifted from sole arbiter to lead decision-maker in a small team that now includes a video assistant, an assistant video assistant, and an offside specialist. The pitchside monitor — adopted in most major competitions — gave referees a final visual check before overturning their original call.

The semi-automated next step

Football's next-generation video tools build on VAR rather than replace it. Semi-automated offside technology, debuted at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, uses multiple in-stadium cameras and a ball-mounted sensor to flag offside positions to the video team within seconds. UEFA introduced a version of the same system for the Champions League from the 2022-23 knockout stages, and many domestic leagues now use it alongside standard VAR.

The intent of semi-automation is to remove the most controversial part of the VAR workflow — the slow, manually drawn offside line — without giving up the rest of the review system. Reviews on the other three categories (penalties, red cards, mistaken identity) remain a human judgement call.

How to follow VAR decisions in live data

Modern live football data platforms log VAR interventions alongside the standard match events, distinguishing between on-field reviews, VAR-only check-and-confirm decisions, and overturned calls. Platforms such as RubiScore surface VAR-driven goal disallowances, penalty awards, and red card adjustments inside the match event timeline, so a viewer reading the live feed can see exactly when and why a decision was changed.

That level of timeline detail matters because the headline scoreline rarely tells the VAR story. A 1-0 win where the only goal followed a VAR-awarded penalty, or a 2-2 draw where two offside-line reviews removed otherwise-legitimate goals, looks identical to a clean result on a league table. The intervention log is where the real refereeing story lives.

Why the timeline matters

The question "when was VAR introduced in football" has a single short answer — 2018, when IFAB wrote it into the Laws of the Game — and a longer one that explains why the rollout looks uneven across leagues today. Some federations have used VAR since 2017. Others, mostly outside the top tier, have only adopted it in the last two or three seasons. A handful still operate without it.

That patchwork is part of the reason VAR remains a permanent talking point. The system itself is stable. The way each competition chooses to apply it — when a referee uses the pitchside monitor, when the video team intervenes, how decisions reach the stadium — continues to evolve. The timeline is the starting point for reading any of those debates clearly, and the full live record of each decision is published in match-data feeds on rubiscore.com.