Ranking the 5 longest VAR checks in English football history after Man City farce

Love it or loathe it, VAR has completely changed top-level football in England.

It’s safe to say it hasn’t stopped people from discussing officiating decisions, but it has changed what we think of what should and shouldn’t be handball and offside.

We’ve ranked the five longest VAR checks since the technology was introduced in 2019 and why each decision took so ball-crushingly long.

Jay Rodriguez was initially flagged offside before VAR said he was onside, only for the final check to conclude that he was offside all along.

It meant Burnley were denied a late equalising goal as they fell to a 2-1 defeat against Bournemouth in 2023.

It’s what we all dreamt about as children, isn’t it? Scoring in our fantasy World Cup final and having the goal forensically examined for fault.

It’s symptomatic of a culture that determines every decision must be ‘right’ and not questioning why football is treated with such reverent importance.

Manchester City’s 2-0 win over Newcastle in the first leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final in January 2026 was overshadowed by the antithesis of the fans’ football experience.

It took five and a half minutes for Chris Kavanagh to disallow Antoine Semenyo’s second-half header for offside.

Because Nick Pope and Erling Haaland were so close together, the semi-automated offside technology failed and VAR official Stuart Atwell had to resort to the old method of drawing lines.

“I understand the process but VAR wasn’t brought in for this reason here,” Micah Richards said afterwards.

“This is anti-goal which they said they weren’t going to do, they said they weren’t going to re-referee the game.

“This for me is re-refereeing the game. They are both going at it. It might be right, but I don’t think we should be taking away goals for this. Why take five minutes?”

West Ham thought they’d poached a last-minute winner against Aston Villa in March 2024. Fools.

Referee Jarred Gillett and VAR Tony Harrington spent over five minutes agonising over whether a scrappy goal from Konstantinos Mavropanos had hit the arm of Tomas Soucek on its way in.

The replays looked inconclusive, with a post obscuring the view of a sea of arms and legs on the goal-line.

But the goal was eventually ruled out, one of three chalked off for the Hammers, to leave boss David Moyes sporting his trademark thousand-yard stare.

Nikola Milenkovic doubled Forest’s lead at West Ham in May 2025 – but only after VAR investigated the goal for over six minutes.

Again, the clustering of players exposed the limitations of semi-automated offside technology and lines had to be drawn. Why wasn’t this considered in the consultation period?

The trialling of semi-automated offsides in last season’s FA Cup Fifth Round led to farcical scenes at Bournemouth and a VAR delay of eight minutes(!).

Technology scrutinised an incident which saw Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez scrambling to turn the ball home, but it took the length of time to cook a frozen pizza to determine.

Both sets of fans chanted ‘it’s not football anymore’. They weren’t wrong.