The fix soccer is looking for already exists, and American football has been running it since 1999. Not more video. Not more officials in a bunker. The NFL coach's challenge, a red flag thrown on the field, by a man everyone can see, who pays for being wrong. The Manchester derby controversy that has everybody shouting this week is exactly the kind of call that system was built to resolve, and the piece making the rounds today makes the case plainly: soccer keeps rebuilding the video booth when the problem is the door.

Here is the distinction that matters. VAR is a review that happens to you. The challenge is a review you ask for.

How the NFL coach's challenge actually works

A head coach gets two challenges a game. He throws the flag, the play stops, the referee goes to the monitor, and if he was right, he keeps the timeout and gets a third challenge if he wins both. If he was wrong, it costs him a timeout, which in the fourth quarter is the most expensive currency on the field. Inside the final two minutes and in overtime, coaches lose the flag entirely and the booth takes over, because that is exactly when a coach would burn every stoppage he had to buy a look.

That structure does three things soccer's version does not. It rations reviews, so the game is not stopped for every stray elbow. It puts a name and a face on the request, so the crowd knows who paused their afternoon. And it makes being wrong hurt, which is the only reliable way to keep anybody honest.

VAR has none of that. No budget, no cost, no visible author. A voice in a room somewhere decides a moment is worth revisiting, and 60,000 people stand there with their hands out waiting to be told whether they are allowed to celebrate. The delay is not the crime. The mystery is.

Why soccer fans hate VAR more than they hated bad calls

Because a missed call used to be an act of God, and now it is a decision by committee. Supporters made their peace with human error a century ago. What they cannot stomach is four minutes of silence followed by a verdict with no fingerprints on it. The NFL is not perfect at this, not close, but when the referee flips the mic on and says the ruling on the field is overturned, the transaction is complete. Somebody asked, somebody looked, somebody answered. Argument closed, or at least argued about on equal terms.

checked the almanac: the NFL hated replay too, once. Instant replay arrived in 1986, the owners voted it out of existence in 1992, and the league spent seven seasons living with the naked eye before the red flag brought it back in 1999. The technology did not change much in those seven years. The mechanism did. That is the whole lesson.

The honest counterpoint

Soccer is not football, and the obvious objection is the clock. There are no natural stoppages to hide a review inside, no timeouts to spend, no possession changes every few minutes. A manager's challenge would need its own currency, and inventing one is not trivial.

And the NFL should not be smug here. The league made pass interference reviewable for the 2019 season after the no-call in the NFC Championship Game that sent the Rams to the Super Bowl over New Orleans, and the experiment was such a mess that it was gone after one year. Judgment calls resist replay in every sport. Objective ones, a foot on a line, a ball over a line, do not. Soccer's semi-automated offside work is the good version of this, and it is good precisely because it answers a yes or no question fast.

What comes next

Law changes in soccer run through IFAB, which meets in the winter, so nothing shifts this weekend no matter how loud the derby fallout gets. The push has to come from the leagues, and the Premier League already survived a vote on scrapping VAR entirely in 2024 by keeping it and promising to fix it. Two seasons later, we are still having this conversation.

Meanwhile, Thursday night at Highmark Stadium, Detroit and Buffalo, somebody's coach will pull a red flag out of his sock and throw it twelve yards into a scrum of officials like a man mad at a mailbox. Undignified. Completely transparent. That is the point.