The Premier League has produced a verdict that sounds impossible at first reading.
Sunderland should not have been awarded a penalty against Arsenal. Referee John Brooks got the decision wrong. Yet VAR Stuart Attwell was also right not to overturn it.
That is not VarVote trying to reconcile two competing opinions. It is the conclusion of the Premier League's own Key Match Incidents Panel, published on Wednesday, and it exposes one of the most important distinctions in the entire VAR system: a wrong refereeing decision is not automatically a VAR error.
Understanding why explains a great deal about decisions that frustrate supporters every weekend.
What happened in Sunderland vs Arsenal?
In the 54th minute of Arsenal's 2-0 win at Sunderland on 12 September, Ezri Konsa and Dan Ballard became tangled while competing at a set piece. Brooks decided Konsa had committed a holding offence and awarded Sunderland a penalty.
David Raya saved Enzo Le Fée's spot kick, so the decision ultimately did not alter the scoreline. It did, however, provoke a furious response from Mikel Arteta and a subsequent discussion between Arsenal and refereeing body Pro Ref. 
The panel's explanation was important. Although Konsa initially had his arms around Ballard, it concluded that Ballard also engaged in holding and pulled Konsa towards him as both players went to ground.
On the question of whether a penalty should have been awarded, the vote was emphatic: 0-5 in support of the referee's decision.
Then came the more interesting vote.
Why did the panel still support VAR?
The panel separately considered whether Attwell should have intervened. This time, the vote was 3-2 in favour of the VAR decision not to recommend a review.
The majority believed Brooks' mistake did not reach the Premier League's high threshold for a clear and obvious error because of the combined actions of Konsa and Ballard.
That distinction matters. VAR is not designed simply to ask: Would I have made the same decision as the referee? For a subjective decision, it must effectively ask a second question: Is the referee's decision clearly and obviously wrong on the available evidence?
Those questions can produce different answers.
The Premier League explicitly acknowledges this in its explanation of the KMI process. The panel first judges whether the referee reached the correct decision. If it believes the decision was wrong, it then considers whether the mistake was sufficiently clear to justify VAR intervention.
That is how the same panel can conclude that no penalty was the better decision while also concluding that VAR should leave the penalty alone. 
What does 'clear and obvious' actually mean?
The principle comes directly from the VAR protocol. The original decision is supposed to remain unless video review clearly demonstrates a 'clear and obvious error' in a reviewable situation.
The Premier League deliberately operates with what it calls a high bar of intervention for subjective decisions. Its 2026/27 Football Principles again state that the referee's call should stand unless the available evidence shows a clear and obvious mistake.
This is also why VAR should not function as a second referee re-officiating every incident from a television screen.
For factual matters such as a player being offside, the position of the ball or whether an offence occurred inside or outside the penalty area, VAR can establish an objective answer. Subjective fouls, holding and many handball situations are different. There can be a range of decisions that the video evidence can support without any one of them being sufficiently indefensible to trigger an intervention.
Our guide to when VAR can intervene explains that distinction in more detail.
Wrong decision does not mean VAR failure
This is where much of the public argument around VAR becomes confused.
When a replay makes supporters believe a referee chose the wrong outcome, the natural reaction is to ask why VAR did not correct it. But under the protocol, identifying a preferable decision and identifying a clear and obvious error are not necessarily the same thing.
The Sunderland incident is an unusually clean example because the Premier League has now put numbers against both judgments. Five members thought Brooks was wrong. Only two of those five thought the mistake was clear enough for VAR to intervene.
You can disagree with that threshold. You can argue that a system with access to multiple camera angles should correct any identifiable error rather than preserve an incorrect decision. But that is a criticism of how VAR is designed, not necessarily evidence that Attwell failed to follow the current approach.
That distinction is essential when judging VAR fairly.
Compare it with the Haaland error
The same KMI report provides an almost perfect contrast.
In the Manchester derby, VAR established that Erling Haaland was onside before his goal against Manchester United. But Enzo Fernandez was in an offside position and, according to the KMI Panel, attempted to play a nearby ball while affecting the defenders' and goalkeeper's ability to play it.
There was no protection from the intervention threshold in that case. The panel voted 5-0 that the outcome was wrong and 5-0 that the VAR intervention was wrong. It said an on-field review should have been recommended for the missed subjective offside offence.
Howard Webb subsequently described the VAR team's focus as 'tunnel vision'. We examined the released audio and what went wrong in our analysis of the Haaland Manchester derby VAR error.
Put the two cases together and the difference becomes clearer. At Sunderland, the panel believed there was enough subjectivity in the mutual holding for the referee's wrong decision to remain within the acceptable VAR threshold. At Old Trafford, the relevant offence had effectively been missed while the VAR team concentrated on another part of the incident.
One was judged to be a refereeing error that VAR could legitimately leave untouched. The other was a VAR error that should have changed the outcome.
Is the clear-and-obvious rule good for football?
That is the more difficult question.
The high threshold exists for a reason. Without it, almost every subjective penalty, challenge or handball could become an invitation for another official to substitute their judgment for the referee's. More interventions would mean more reviews, more delays and potentially even less consistency as marginal incidents are repeatedly re-refereed.
The alternative has its own obvious weakness. Supporters can watch a panel declare that a decision was wrong and then be told that the technology designed to correct major mistakes was right to leave it wrong.
That is logically consistent within the VAR protocol. It is not necessarily intuitive, and the Sunderland decision shows why the phrase 'clear and obvious' remains central to the argument about what supporters actually want VAR to be.
There is another layer to the Sunderland debate too. Ballard has already been involved in a remarkably similar discussion this season, with contact against Arsenal producing a penalty while another incident did not. Compare the two Ballard incidents and vote on whether the decisions were consistent.
Ultimately, the KMI Panel has answered the narrow question. Brooks should not have awarded the penalty, but Attwell was not required to rescue him from it.
The bigger question belongs to football supporters: should VAR merely correct clear and obvious mistakes, or should its job be to get every reviewable decision as close to correct as possible?