When Did VAR Start in Football? A Country-by-Country Look

VAR did not switch on across world football on a single date. The Video Assistant Referee began as a set of trials in 2016, was written permanently into the Laws of the Game in 2018, and was then rolled out league by league and tournament by tournament between 2017 and 2020. That staggered timeline is why "when did VAR start" has a different answer in almost every country.

The Short Answer

There are three dates worth separating. The IFAB, the body that governs football's laws, approved live VAR experiments in 2016. After two years of trials it made the system a permanent part of the Laws of the Game in 2018. But the date that matters to most fans is neither of those — it is when their own league or competition actually adopted it, and that ranged from 2017 for the earliest movers to 2019 and beyond for others.

Where It Began: The Netherlands and the First Trials

The groundwork predates the trials by several years. The concept of using video review in football was developed in the Netherlands, where the national federation ran an officiating research project that tested how replays could support referees. That work fed into the IFAB, which in 2016 authorised a formal period of live experiments, allowing competitions around the world to trial VAR under controlled conditions before any permanent rule existed. The approach was deliberately evidence-led: rather than imposing video review everywhere at once, the IFAB let competitions opt in, gathered data on how reviews affected both accuracy and the flow of matches, and only then moved toward a permanent law.

This is the deepest answer to "when did VAR start": as an idea and an experiment in the early-to-mid 2010s, long before it appeared on television in a match most supporters would recognise.

2016: The First Live Tests

The first competitive outings came in 2016. A match in the United States, in the lower-tier professional ranks, is generally recorded as the first competitive fixture to use VAR during the IFAB trial period that year. Around the same time, an international friendly became one of the first senior representative matches to test the system. These were proof-of-concept appearances rather than full league adoption — the technology was being checked, not yet relied upon. Crucially, the early tests were as much about process as accuracy: learning how to run a review without halting the game too often, which is the question that would shape every rollout that followed.

2017: The First Leagues and FIFA's First Tournament

2017 was the year VAR moved from experiment to regular use. Australia's A-League is often credited as one of the first top professional leagues to use VAR in regular competition, introducing it in the first half of 2017. In North America, Major League Soccer adopted it during the 2017 season. Two of Europe's biggest leagues followed for the 2017-18 campaign: Italy's Serie A and Germany's Bundesliga both began using VAR that season, making them the first of the continent's traditional powerhouses to commit.

FIFA also took its first step that year. The 2017 Confederations Cup, held in Russia, became the first FIFA tournament to deploy VAR — a deliberate dress rehearsal for the much larger event to come.

2018: The World Cup and the Law Change

2018 was VAR's breakthrough year on the global stage. The FIFA World Cup in Russia was the first edition of the tournament to use the Video Assistant Referee, putting the system in front of a worldwide audience for the first time. In the same year, the IFAB formally wrote VAR into the Laws of the Game, ending the experimental phase and making it a permanent, codified part of football.

Domestic adoption widened too. Spain's La Liga and France's Ligue 1 both introduced VAR for the 2018-19 season, bringing two more of Europe's major leagues into line.

2019: The Champions League and the Premier League

Europe's elite club competition and England's top flight were comparatively late. UEFA brought VAR into the Champions League during the 2018-19 season, applying it from the knockout rounds in early 2019. The Premier League held out until the 2019-20 season, becoming one of the last of the major European leagues to adopt it despite England being home to one of the sport's wealthiest competitions.

2019 also saw VAR used at the FIFA Women's World Cup, extending the system across the international game.

Why the Rollout Was So Uneven

The patchwork timeline was not accident or indecision alone. Adopting VAR is expensive and logistically heavy, and that explains most of the variation:

These factors fall unevenly across countries and divisions, so the same season that brought VAR to a top flight often left the league below it untouched.

A Country-by-Country Snapshot

Pulling the threads together, the headline adoption dates for major competitions look like this:

Tracking these start dates alongside results is part of how live football data platforms such as RubiScore frame match records — a competition's data carries a meaningful dividing line at the season VAR arrived, because the way goals, penalties, and red cards are adjudicated changed from that point on.

How VAR's Arrival Changed Each League

For anyone looking back through a competition's records, the adoption season works like a dividing line. Before it, marginal offside goals, missed penalties, and uncalled red card offences stood as the referee saw them in real time. After it, those same situations became subject to review, which shifted how certain decisions were reached — tight offsides were now resolved frame by frame, and clear errors that once survived were corrected.

This is why the start date is more than trivia. Comparing a league's penalty counts, disallowed goals, or dismissals across the VAR boundary means comparing two slightly different sets of rules in practice. The season VAR arrived is the point at which a competition's numbers stop being cleanly comparable with the years before it.

What "When Did VAR Start" Really Means

The honest answer to the question depends on what you are really asking. If you mean the idea, it began in the early 2010s in the Netherlands. If you mean the first competitive use, 2016. If you mean the first major leagues, 2017. If you mean the World Cup and the law itself, 2018. And if you mean your own league, the date is probably somewhere between 2017 and 2020, depending on where you watch your football.

What unites all of those answers is that VAR's history is short. In the span of a few seasons it went from an experiment to a fixture of the modern game, reshaping how decisions are made at the highest levels. Season-by-season match data spanning that transition is published on rubiscore.com, where the arrival of VAR can be read as a turning point in each competition's record rather than a single global event.