VAR, PGMOL and the Grievance Machine: How the Premier League Turned Controversy Into a Product

The clock on my screen jumped from minute 67 to minute 71 and the ball still had not rolled. I was sitting in a small flat in eastern Beijing, a four-panel screen in front of me, one earpiece in, my eyes locked on the line drawn across the grass. Only one question ran through my head: is what is playing on that screen football, or is it a reality show labelled as football?

That night I counted four trips to the touchline by the referee, two interventions by the VAR room, and one roar from the stands that I have heard in many stadiums around the world: the sound of orchestrated outrage. Not the genuine anger of spectators who have been cheated. Instead, an outrage with a script, a rhythm, and a host.

I call it performative sadness. In the Premier League, performative sadness is a revenue line, not an accident.

Context: when a cartoon becomes a news bulletin

England has something no other football league on earth has: a cartoonist working for a major newspaper, drawing about football every week, and read as though his work were part of the news bulletin. David Squires has drawn for The Guardian since 2026. He does not publish odds, he does not analyse tactics, he does not predict results. He draws the mood of a football culture. In his latest strip he picked the one thing all of England was talking about: a big weekend of controversial calls, with the Premier League leading the way for debatable decisions and performative sadness.

Reading a cartoon is not reading a report. It gives you no xG, no PPDA, no average added time. But it gives you something no data sheet can: it tells you how the public feels.

And the public feels tired.

Since the 2026-20 season, when VAR formally entered the Premier League, the system has passed through four phases: disbelief, anger, negotiation, and now a fifth — organised indifference. Organised indifference means viewers still scream every time a decision goes wrong, but they scream differently. They used to scream out of surprise. Now they scream because they were already waiting.

PGMOL — the body that runs refereeing in English professional football — sits under pressure from both sides. On one side, clubs and fans demand an explanation for every decision. On the other, IFAB, the global guardian of the Laws of the Game, demands that referees apply those laws consistently and without free interpretation. In between stand human beings of flesh and bone, running 12 km a match, dissected frame by frame.

I once sat in a press room at Euro 2026, after Italy versus Belgium, and heard an older male journalist announce to a crowded room that a woman like me should be asking about a player's haircut. I answered with data: Italy won only the duel percentage, 58 percent, the midfield produced 11 successful tackles, and Belgium could not escape the press for the entire second half. People remembered me for that answer.

The lesson I drew was not about gender. It was this: emotion cannot be defended by emotion. Emotion has to be defended by numbers.

So when I read a cartoon about referees, I do not read it as a lament. I read it as a situation report.

Core: three layers of judgment for one act

On English grass there is an uncomfortable paradox: VAR's biggest problem is that it is right in a way the crowd cannot accept.

The structure has to be read in layers. Every VAR decision in the Premier League passes through three levels: the referee on the pitch, the VAR in the technical room, and then the independent review panel — the Independent Key Match Incidents Panel — which meets weekly to reassess decisions. That panel regularly reaches conclusions that contradict what happened on the pitch. What does that mean?

It means every Premier League match has as many as three authorities judging a single act. The referee judges on the pitch. VAR judges through a screen. The panel judges after the match, in writing. Three verdicts for one shoulder charge.

No authority is entirely right, and no authority is entirely wrong. That is the tragedy.

In such a system, every conclusion can be rebutted by another conclusion. And when every conclusion can be rebutted, the final conclusion belongs to the loudest voice. The loudest voice in English football is not the referee. It is not PGMOL. Nor IFAB. It is the media.

This is the point many people miss. The war over VAR is not about technology. It is about the right to interpret.

I rebuilt the footage of the last ten Premier League matches I had stored on my hard drive, adding up the stoppage time caused by video interventions. What I counted matters less than what I felt: every time a match stopped for a review, the stands erupted. Every time the stands erupted, the television audience rose. Every time the television audience rose, the sponsors were pleased. There is no incentive here for VAR to stop causing controversy.

That is what David Squires' cartoon touches without stating. It does not attack VAR. It attacks a culture in which both the referee and the aggrieved are actors in the same play.

The Premier League holds an advantage no other league has: global media reach. A controversial decision at Villa Park on a Saturday becomes a talking point in Hanoi, Jakarta, Cairo and Rio de Janeiro before sunrise. No other league can replicate a controversy that fast.

Look at Vietnam, and V-League has refereeing controversies too. But a V-League controversy dies by the next morning, because there is no mechanism to keep it alive. No weekly review panel. No formal press explanation. No transmission system powerful enough to turn a bad tackle into a global media event.

Look at China, and the CSL has VAR oversight and publishes the audio dialogue between officials, but the coverage is not deep enough to spawn a cartoon industry.

The Premier League does all three at once: it produces controversy, ships controversy, and packages controversy as merchandise. No other league has reached that level of completeness in the cycle.

In 2026, when I wrote that Russia would reach the semi-finals on a very specific logic — fitness, cold conditions, and the fact nobody took them seriously — I was stoned on forums for a week. When Russia eliminated Spain on penalties, the old article surged back. What I learned was not that I was right. What I learned was that a specific, verifiable prediction outlives a vague complaint.

Squires' cartoons work the same way. They do not predict matches. They predict mood. And the current mood of the Premier League is the mood of someone so used to being deceived that they no longer bother to rage — they only grieve, in a very beautiful way.

And a beautiful grief sells extremely well.

The book "Chaos in the Box" by the same author is promoted inside the cartoon itself. You can buy a print of the drawing. You can buy the book. You can buy back your own outrage, packaged in a handsome frame, delivered to your door.

That is the complete cycle. A controversial decision happens. The media talks. The cartoon mocks. A product is born. Fans buy it. The money returns to the system. The cycle repeats next weekend.

Some revolutions do not fire shots — they just quietly pass the ball. And the revolution here turns outrage into revenue, silently, with no press conference and no statement.

Contrarian: the thing that must change is not the technology

The counter-intuitive point is this: if I could change one thing in the Premier League's refereeing system, I would not choose VAR. I would not choose referee training. I would not even choose semi-automated offside technology, the system being rolled out to shorten decision times.

I would choose the media.

Every technological reform gets swallowed by the same machine. When semi-automated offside arrives, people will stop arguing about the line. They will argue about something else. Perhaps the moment the ball leaves the foot. Perhaps the camera angle. Perhaps the five-centimetre margin of error.

I once set myself a question: if VAR worked perfectly for 38 rounds, would the Premier League have fewer controversies? I went back to the data and realised the answer does not lie in VAR. It lies elsewhere — in what the market wants.

A league without controversy is a league with fewer viewers on Monday.

I may be wrong. And if I am wrong, the way to test it is simple: watch the Premier League's media engagement metrics in whichever season produces the fewest VAR controversies. If those metrics fall, I am right. If they do not, I will rewrite.

One thing I am sure of: performative sadness is not the disease. It is the symptom. And a symptom never cures the disease when the disease sits somewhere else.

People call that madness. I call it reading the game with both heart and mind.

I was stoned for a week for daring to speak against the wind. And I will speak again.

Takeaway: a testable prediction

My prediction: within the next two seasons, the Premier League will announce a package of refereeing-communication reforms — possibly live audio of the dialogue between the on-field referee and the VAR room, or written explanations of decisions published within 24 hours of a match. The reason is economic, not technical. If they do not do it, another product will take their place: organised silence, and organised silence does not sell tickets.

The crowd shouting is not evidence. I need to watch the tape. And the tape shows me a beautiful anger — staged, packaged, and being sold back to us.