How the Verdict Works

Each exhibit presents one refereeing decision — a penalty, a card, a silent check, a non-call — with the facts as presented and the footage where available. You rule on it as a juror, choosing one of three options:

• Fair 🟩 — the call was correct. The system worked. Nothing to see here.
• Soft VARgentina 🟨 — debatable but defensible. It smells, but a reasonable referee makes that call on a normal day.
• Full VARgentina 🟥 — indefensible. The jury finds no honest reading of the Laws that produces this outcome.

Voting is anonymous and needs no account. The three-option design is deliberate: a binary right/wrong ballot would erase the middle ground where most real refereeing controversy lives — the calls that are simultaneously givable and suspicious.

The VARgentina Meter converts the jury’s ballots into a single score from 0 to 10. The formula is a weighted average: Fair votes count 0, Soft VARgentina votes count 5, Full VARgentina votes count 10, summed and divided by the total number of jurors, rounded to one decimal. An exhibit where the jury splits evenly between Fair and Full lands at 5.0 — the same score as a unanimous Soft verdict, which is exactly the point: the Meter measures the weight of suspicion, not its variance.

Scores map to four verdict bands: Fair Play (0–2), Mild Suspicion (above 2, below 5), Strong VARgentina (5 to below 8) and Full VARgentina (8–10). The extremes earn stamps — CERTIFIED FOOTBALL at 2.0 or below, CERTIFIED VARGENTINA at 8.0 or above — the tribunal’s equivalent of a case closed with prejudice, in one direction or the other.

Verdicts update live as ballots arrive, and exhibits with fewer than a thousand jurors are labelled as early verdicts — real numbers, clearly marked as still forming. Vote tallies are counted server-side, and the displayed percentages always sum to exactly 100.

The tribunal runs on two documents per case: the facts and the feeling. The facts — score, minute, referee, what was decided, what VAR did — are verified against major outlets (ESPN, Sky, Al Jazeera, FOX and others) before an exhibit is filed, and contested claims are always attributed to the fans, media or named parties making them, never stated as the site’s own conclusion. The feeling is yours; that’s what the ballot is for.

Each exhibit also carries the tribunal’s case notes — the relevant Laws of the Game, what the VAR protocol did and didn’t permit, the precedents, and the strongest version of both sides’ arguments. The satire is in the framing; the analysis underneath is done straight, because a verdict is only worth casting on a case honestly presented. For the protocol itself, see how VAR actually works.

Verdicts aren’t just decoration. In VAR Replay, the free browser game where you take the wronged side and try to out-score history, the referee’s bias level in each scenario is driven by the jury’s verdict on the real incident — the harsher the community ruled, the harder the whistle leans against you. The final report collects the tournament’s verdicts in one place.

And one rule above all of it, printed on every page: results reflect fan opinion, not verified wrongdoing. The tribunal is a running joke among fans with a scoring system attached — a courtroom of vibes, honestly labelled. The case file is open.