What’s going on with stealth, and can it be fixed?

At what point is the threshold for a player clearly influencing the goalkeeper exceeded? The only way to end these discussions is to make an objective decision, but we must be careful of unintended consequences.

Will we get more consistent decisions? No doubt, but as we saw with the rule of handball, if you add more shooters it simply leads to more disallowed goals.

How about saying that a player who is offside in the six-yard box should always influence the goalkeeper? You will still have shades of gray and potentially disallowed goals that go against the spirit of the law.

If the offside player is on the other side of the goal to the keeper, do we really want to disallow the goal? If you are objective, it should be so.

This does not seem to be the path we want to take, leaving us with a self-inflicted dilemma.

VAR are instructed not to get involved in a personal offside unless a clear foul has been made in either direction. That’s why tackles are so rare, and borderline decisions like Andy Robertson’s at Manchester City generate the most controversy.

Last season, there were only two sight-line VAR interventions, both of which resulted in disallowed goals: Bernardo Silva for Manchester City at Wolverhampton and Jamie Vardy for Leicester City at Fulham.

In the 2023-24 season, four goals were disallowed for the infringement: Rasmus Hoglund for Manchester United at Burnley, Mohamed Salah for Liverpool at Burnley, Lorenz Asegnon for Burnley at Crystal Palace, and Tawanda Chiriwa for Wolves against West Ham.

It is understandable that proponents would use these to compare, but while the two decisions could be similar, they will never be exactly the same. For this reason, we will always be aware of contradictions.