The Video Assisted Referee is transforming soccer. It is also revealing some of the deepest contradictions about the ways we think about law, power, and politics. The ultimate enforcer of soccer’s rules was no longer the referee on the pitch but had become instead a bundle of human and technological systems that spanned the country, coordinated by distant satellites. VAR is the outcome of a lust for automation and an obsession with fairness over equality and precision over the narrative. In this sense it is a product of our times and has a familiar epistemology — that human error, once a staple of controversy and debate in soccer, can be made extinct by technology.