Fifa’s head of refereeing, Pierluigi Collina, says that using VAR to check whether corner kicks have been awarded correctly will not slow matches down.
Several domestic leagues have said they do not want VAR to be used for corner decisions. The proposal from Fifa was rejected during the October meeting of the International Football Association Board (Ifab), the body that sets football’s rules.
Even though the idea was turned down, Fifa still plans to test this system at the 2026 World Cup in the USA, Mexico, and Canada.
Speaking at a media briefing in Washington DC on Thursday, Collina explained that corner checks would not interrupt the flow of the game because there is already a natural pause.
“When a corner is awarded, there’s a natural delay because the two centre-backs usually have to come forward,” Collina said. “It normally takes 10–15 seconds before the corner can be taken. If in that time we can see the corner was awarded incorrectly, and everyone has the evidence, then why not fix it?”
Collina questioned why football should ignore clear mistakes: “Why should we bury our heads in the sand and just hope nothing important happens from a wrongly given corner?”
Football Association chief executive Mark Bullingham, who sits on the Ifab board, has already said he is against the idea.
Collina stressed that the main purpose of the proposal is to ensure that decisions are correct.
“Our objective should be to make the right decisions on the pitch,” he said. “It would be unfortunate if a match result was decided not by the players, but by an honest error from the referee.”
He added that this desire for accuracy is what led football to introduce technology to help referees more than a decade ago.
Discussions on the matter will continue at the next Ifab meeting in January.
In the October meeting, Ifab did agree that VAR could be expanded to correct cases where a player is wrongly given a second yellow card that results in a red card.
