Premier League vote to continue using VAR next season with Wolves the only club to back its abolition
Premier League clubs have voted in favour of continuing to use VAR in the top flight of English football, the league has announced.
The 20 clubs have voted 19 to one to keep VAR next season. The league confirmed there had been a vote in favour of continuing with the technology in 2024-25.
The PA news agency understands Wolves – who last month called the vote to scrap VAR – were ultimately the only club to back its abolition.
The Black Country club were understood to be adamant they wanted a vote to take place, even though they anticipated a heavy defeat.
Speaking after a weekend of significant errors by VAR officials in February, former Manchester United defender Gary Neville insisted that the Premier League must persist with the system.
Neville told Sky Sports: “I think we can always expect more. But it is human error – things happen so quickly. We sometimes see things out here and then we see the replays and we don’t spot things, so we get it. I know they are trained to do this and spot these things, but we don’t spot everything ourselves and we’ve been around football a long time.
“What I don’t like the idea of is that, because Howard Webb has come out and apologised, all of a sudden that should signal the end of VAR. Even he accepts it’s bad.
“Honestly, I think it would be a massive mistake and it won’t happen anyway, whether I say so or whether people in the game say so or the media say so. It would be a massive mistake to lose VAR because of this weekend.
“The amount of really bad decisions that have been overturned, the amount of offside goals that have then been corrected the other way – the good far outweighs the bad. But it has been a difficult weekend and a challenging weekend for referees.
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“Let’s be clear, there are a lot more good decisions being made than there are bad decisions and that’s coming from someone who was very critical of referees sometimes during my career, doesn’t give referees an easy time, has no sway towards VAR or against VAR. But if we want accuracy in decisions, which is what we’ve called for for all these years, then we should persist with it.
“Webb says he’s investigating it and reviewing it. We want to look at the personnel, we want to look at what’s happened this weekend, we want to put it down as just being a really bad weekend. It’s not happened before this season – it’s happened this weekend all at once.”