I asked Claude about VAR and the perception of how call quality has changed (or not). I thought it was interesting enough reading so I’ll post it here, but hidden for those who don’t want to read AI content.
VAR and call quality perception
Yes — your observation is actually a composite of several named phenomena, and it’s a genuinely well-studied space. There isn’t one single term that captures the whole thing, but here are the pieces:
Prevalence-induced concept change is probably the closest single match. This is from Levari et al.'s 2018 Science paper (“Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment”): when instances of a problem become rarer, people expand their definition of the problem to include cases they previously would have ignored. Their famous example was showing people blue and purple dots — as blue dots became rare, participants started classifying purple dots as blue. Applied to VAR: as truly egregious refereeing errors get corrected, the threshold for what counts as a “controversy” drops, so marginal offsides and debatable handballs now occupy the outrage slot that ghost goals used to. The controversy count stays constant even as objective error rates fall, because “controversy” is a relative concept that recalibrates to the new baseline.
Algorithm aversion is the second piece — Dietvorst, Simmons, and Massey’s 2015 work showing that people abandon trust in algorithms after seeing them err, even when the algorithm outperforms humans overall. A human referee missing a call is “part of the game”; a multi-million-dollar review system getting it wrong feels like a betrayal of its entire premise. The errors are judged against a perfection standard the technology implicitly promised, not against the human baseline it replaced. There’s a related finding (Dietvorst & Bharti, 2020) that people reject algorithms specifically in uncertain, judgment-heavy domains — which is exactly what subjective calls like handball and “clear and obvious” red cards are.
The Tocqueville paradox (or “revolution of rising expectations”) covers the expectation-shift dynamic: as conditions improve, grievances intensify rather than diminish because expectations rise faster than reality. VAR raised the expected accuracy ceiling, so residual errors feel worse than the same errors did pre-VAR.
There’s also a procedural justice angle from the organizational fairness literature: people’s sense of fairness depends heavily on process legitimacy, not just outcome accuracy. VAR decisions that take four minutes, happen off-screen, and involve invisible deliberation feel less legitimate than an instant human call — even when they’re more correct.
And the sports-specific literature backs your intuition directly. Research on VAR consistently finds evidence that the technology is very accurate, which would provide fairness to the game, yet its use remains controversial, with coaches displaying mixed opinions. One study of fan reactions at the 2018 World Cup explicitly framed this as VAR’s paradoxical nature — technologies introduced in the name of a “fairer game” that intensify and produce a range of unintended consequences. Work on players’ experiences found something similar to your point about improper use: while technology is commonly perceived to enhance accuracy and fairness in officiating, its misuse has given rise to feelings of conspiracy and distrust, with perceived game-to-game inconsistency undermining the sense of fairness. And a recent EPL analysis notes that VAR may affect not only the correction of clear errors but the broader ecology of refereeing — shifting thresholds for sanctioning and perceptions of fairness, which is your “new controversies created by the tool itself” mechanism. PubMed Central + 3
One more subtlety worth adding to your model: VAR doesn’t just fail to reduce controversy — it manufactures new categories of it that couldn’t exist before (millimeter offsides, “why didn’t they check the monitor,” re-refereeing on slow motion). Slow-motion replay itself is known to make contact look more deliberate and violent than it appears at full speed, which creates disputes about incidents nobody would have argued about live. So the controversy supply is partially conserved (concept change), partially transferred (from missed calls to process complaints), and partially net-new.
If you want to read one thing, the Levari paper is the cleanest articulation of the core mechanism you described, and Tamir & Bar-Eli have written specifically on VAR and fairness perception in football.