The Premier League's Key Match Incidents panel has ruled that Everton should have been awarded a penalty after Bernardo Silva held Merlin Rohl at an Everton corner in the 85th minute of the match at the Hill Dickinson Stadium.
The five-member panel said unanimously that "there is a clear, sustained holding offence which continues as the corner is taken and the ball comes into play," and it concluded that the contact should have led to a penalty while Everton were 3-2 up.
During the match VAR Paul Howard reviewed the footage and decided the foul had ended before the corner was in play and therefore did not recommend a review; the referee did not see the contact on the pitch. Jeremy Doku later scored a stoppage-time equaliser and the game finished 3-3.
Everton manager David Moyes seized on the panel's finding after the game, saying: "If that doesn't get given as a penalty, then it's an absolute free-for-all from now on," and adding, "I might have to start coaching my defenders how to defend differently completely. It looks like now you're able to sort of grapple and wrestle on the ground if you want. I'm absolutely amazed."
The ruling is the third time this season the panel has decided Everton should have been awarded a penalty after video review — earlier incidents arrived in a 1-0 home loss to Arsenal and a 2-1 defeat at West Ham. The KMI report also confirmed three additional VAR errors in other matches, bringing the season total to 23 — a 35% increase on last season at the same stage, when there were 17, and compared with 30 logged at the same stage in 2023-24.
The panel recorded three errors involving penalties this season, two of which were holding offences, and noted that Everton remain the only team yet to receive a VAR intervention in their favour. That combination of specific rulings and headline figures sharpens why the man city everton var decision matters now: it directly altered the picture of a match with title implications and sits inside a wider spike in retrospective reversals.
The tension is clear. In play, the VAR judged the contact had stopped before the corner could produce a penalty and the match officials left the scoreline unchanged. Retrospectively, five reviewers unanimously called that judgement wrong. Everton were leading when the incident occurred; Manchester City scored deep into stoppage time to salvage a draw. The panel's finding therefore turns what was an in-game discretionary call into a concrete argument about whether VAR protocols are catching the events that decide results.
This latest unanimous ruling will intensify scrutiny of how VAR is applied in real time and of the thresholds used by video officials when they choose not to intervene. With 23 errors logged at this stage of the season and three penalty-related mistakes already identified, the KMI panel's decision both validates Everton's immediate complaint and underlines the wider problem the Premier League faces: a string of retrospective corrections that cannot change results, only reputations.
For Everton, the panel's verdict will feel like hard evidence of what Moyes has repeatedly complained about; for Manchester City it is another narrow escape in a title chase where every point matters. The practical consequence is clear — the debate over VAR's operation is unlikely to fade. The panel has made its finding; the next, decisive question is whether the Premier League will change how and when video reviews are initiated during matches to prevent similar post-match reversals from deciding outcomes again.
