Reinventing football: What laws need to change? Handball? Sneak? Penalties?

Will VAR ever be accepted? Maybe not in its current form, so what about adapting it to the challenge system?

You may not have heard of FIFA’s Football Video Support (FVS), which is being trialled in several leagues including Liga F – the top tier women’s football league in Spain.

In the FVS system, the coach is given two challenges per match. When activated, the on-field referee goes to the screen to watch the incident and make a decision. There is no VAR to check the footage, just a replay player to show the incident to the referee.

Everton and England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford likes this theory.

“With VAR, I’ll do it like cricket,” Pickford said. “They’ve got two decisions and the captain has to make sure they review it at the right time, within several seconds. I think that will keep the pace of the game, keep it flowing.”

Sound good? It has its advantages. The assumption is that there will be better final results, although experience has shown that this is not always the case, and the referee still makes mistakes on screen.

Match of the Day host Gabby Logan thinks there’s a different way to do it.

“There should be a time limit on the use of VAR,” she said. “We all agree now that it’s here to stay, and it often leads to good things, but the time it can take is exhausting. It stops the game. People get angry about it.”

“If it was just 90 seconds, I think we would solve a lot of that because if it’s not clear and clear in 90 seconds, it’s not clear and clear.”

But for former England defender Stephen Warnock, the solution is simpler: get rid of VAR.

He said: “I am tired of players not celebrating goals, and fans not knowing what is happening on the field, and there are a lot of inconsistencies in that, and it is due to human error, which is still a big problem.”