The Social Life of VAR: Technological Mediation of Football Practices

This article examines how Video Assistant Referee (VAR) technology is transforming the practice of football. Drawing on a multi-theoretical framework that incorporates actor-network theory, the sociology of emotions, and Bourdieu's theory of capital, we analyze how VAR functions as an active agent of socio-technical change rather than as a neutral decision-making tool. Through qualitative analysis of 20 VAR episodes from major football competitions between 2021-2023 along with associated social media discourse, we uncover significant changes to football's social fabric across four key dimensions. First, VAR establishes new socio-technical networks of expertise where authority is redistributed and decisions emerge from complex human-technology interactions. Second, VAR reshapes the spatio-temporal experience of football, creating layered notions of time and interconnected physical-digital spaces. Third, VAR necessitates technological emotion work - the conscious moderation of emotional displays in response to technological mediation. Finally, VAR generates new forms of technological capital that can reinforce social hierarchies and inequalities. Taken together, these findings illustrate how VAR reflects a fundamental shift in football's social dynamics, emotional architecture, and power relations. More broadly, this case demonstrates how contemporary technologies actively reconfigure the social practices they are embedded within.