How the Premier League table would have looked without VAR

Premier League fans sat through more than 19 hours of VAR delays over the course of this season. And there were more errors – that’s those confirmed by the Premier League’s Key Match Incidents panel – than ever before.

There is a running joke among West Ham fans that at least they will be spared all this in the Championship. The decision to disallow Callum Wilson’s injury-time equaliser against Arsenal – and the ramifications that had at both ends of the table – was quite possibly the most contentious VAR call in history.

Would it have changed the course of history? That is, as with all VAR decisions, impossible to prove. It’s not even possible to definitively prove which ones were errors, as so many of them remain subjective.

It is possible, however, to calculate how the final table would have looked if the technology had not been used at all.

There are three obvious caveats to that. 1) that can only be done by removing goals that were given following VAR incidents 2) it assumes the score would have stayed as it was without those goals 3) you can’t allow for red cards or other incidents which involved the VAR and changed the game, because it is impossible to show definitively how they influenced the scoreline.

It is also worth saying that the absence of VAR would not mean the end of the endless controversy surrounding refereeing decisions. Arsenal went the entire season without conceding a penalty or receiving a red card. Everton, meanwhile, were the only side not to have a single VAR intervention in their favour.