Not a week has gone by in the 2023-24 Premier League season without some kind of VAR controversy making the headlines -- warranted or not.
But which clubs got the worst of the VAR gaffes? Which teams actually benefited? And what difference would it have made to the Premier League table?
Now that the dust has settled on the season, ESPN can reveal the full list of the 31 VAR errors recorded by the Independent Key Match Incidents Panel, and we can rank which teams found themselves on the wrong side of a call the most -- and which teams benefited most. We've also looked at the data behind the referees to see who makes the fewest errors, both with and without taking VAR into consideration.
Revealed: Every official VAR mistake in the Premier League this season
Players, managers and fans have moaned about VAR decisions all season. Yet for every club complaining, there's another delighted that the VAR got involved.
The Premier League's KMI Panel was set up two years ago to review every major decision in each match, but what does it actually do?
"It's made up of ex-players, ex-coaches -- people who'd actually played the game," the Premier League's chief football officer, Tony Scholes, said earlier this year. "The output of that analysis is used to help coach the referees, to help give PGMOL management a view as to where the game, as represented by these former players and coaches, doesn't agree with the approach that the referees are taking.
"It provides the transparency and independence of assessment of the accuracy of the referee's decision-making. The numbers used to be historically criticised by those of us from clubs, that it was referees marking their own homework. This is determined by the independent panel [rather than the referees themselves]."
Each club will doubtless have a long list of mistakes it feels have gone against its team, especially Wolves, who triggered a vote for VAR to be scrapped entirely ahead of next season. Yet the only official list of mistakes is the one created by the KMI Panel, which shared with ESPN the 31 decisions that were deemed to be incorrect. If an incident you are annoyed about isn't listed below, the panel said it was correct or not a clear and obvious error.