VAR, Penalties, and Red Cards: Predicting the Unpredictable
There is a particular flavour of frustration that every predictor knows well. You have spent twenty minutes analysing the form, checking the team news, weighing up the head-to-head record. You settle on 1-0. Then in the 87th minute, a VAR review awards a penalty that nobody in the stadium thought was a foul, and your carefully considered prediction goes in the bin. Sound familiar?
VAR decisions, penalty awards, and red cards are the great equalisers of football prediction. They are the moments that turn a comfortable 1-0 into a 1-1, a dull 0-0 into a chaotic 2-1. And if you are playing score prediction games, they can be the difference between three points and zero.
But here is the thing - these events are not as random as they feel. They follow patterns. And once you understand those patterns, you can start building them into your thinking.
The VAR Factor
Since VAR was introduced to the Premier League in 2019, it has fundamentally changed the flow of matches. Goals get chalked off. Penalties get awarded that referees missed in real time. Red cards appear from nowhere after a pitch-side monitor review. The technology was supposed to remove controversy. Instead, it created a whole new category of it.
What matters for predictors is not whether VAR is good or bad for football. What matters is that VAR increases the number of goals scored per match, primarily through additional penalty awards. In the seasons before VAR, the Premier League averaged roughly 0.18 penalties per match. Since its introduction, that number has climbed to around 0.25. That does not sound like much, but across a full gameweek of ten matches, it means roughly one extra penalty every weekend that would not have been given previously.
For your predictions, this has a practical consequence: low-scoring predictions are slightly less safe than they used to be. A match you might have confidently called 0-0 a few years ago now has a higher chance of producing a goal from a VAR-awarded penalty. Keep that in mind when you are deciding whether to predict a draw.
Penalty Patterns Worth Knowing
Not all teams are equal when it comes to penalties. Some sides consistently win more spot kicks than others, and it is not just about quality. Teams that play with pace and directness in the box tend to draw more fouls. Quick, tricky forwards who take defenders on create more penalty situations than teams that build slowly and cross the ball.
