The Premier League’s Key Match Incidents panel logged 25 video assistant referee errors across the 2025–26 season and identified Arsenal and Chelsea as the clubs that benefited most from those mistakes.
Fans, clubs and pundits are searching “video assistant referee” because those 25 rulings touch directly on the title race: Arsenal won the championship without conceding a penalty or seeing a player sent off, yet the panel found they should have conceded three spot-kicks and had three players dismissed.
The numbers underline how unevenly the errors landed. The panel counted 25 VAR errors this season, up from 18 in 2024–25 and down from earlier peaks of 31 in 2023–24 and 38 in 2022–23. Chelsea and Arsenal led the list of beneficiaries: Chelsea were credited with eight referee mistakes in their favour and Arsenal seven. Chelsea avoided any VAR errors going against them and benefited from two incorrect VAR interventions — one that disallowed a Fulham goal and another that produced a penalty involving Crystal Palace. Bournemouth and Chelsea each gained from four errors, while Crystal Palace and Everton had three mistakes made against them.
Those tallies have clear table consequences. The panel’s supplementary analysis put Arsenal’s advantage from VAR at four points and left Manchester City’s total unchanged; Arsenal sat second on a net score of three and Chelsea top on net benefit. Everton were cited as being denied penalties against Arsenal, West Ham and Manchester City, while Everton themselves escaped a spot-kick against Wolves. Bournemouth avoided two red cards for Marcos Senesi and should also have conceded a penalty at home to Sunderland, later benefiting from a wrongly awarded spot-kick against Crystal Palace.
The season’s central contradiction is stark: Arsenal completed a campaign without a single red card or conceded penalty on the official ledger, yet the Key Match Incidents panel concluded they should have conceded three penalties and seen three players sent off. That gap between match-day outcomes and the panel’s post-game findings is not hypothetical — the panel’s catalogue includes concrete instances, and one recent escape underlines the point. Kai Havertz was not shown a red card after a lunging tackle from behind on Burnley’s Lesley Ugochukwu earlier this month, an incident the panel’s work places in the context of decisions the system failed to correct.
The panel convenes at the end of each round and is made up of three former players and coaches, a Premier League representative and a member of the officials’ governing body. It distinguishes between decisions wrongly changed on review, those wrongly upheld and those that should have been corrected but were not. What the published material does not do is supply a full, match-by-match breakdown of the 25 errors — a gap that leaves supporters and clubs to infer which specific games and moments changed results and points tallies.
That missing roster is the practical question now. The panel’s aggregate findings alter how the season reads, but without a detailed list of which matches produced each error the public cannot test whether the system distorted outcomes on a case-by-case basis. The Premier League must choose whether to publish the full incident log and explain why corrective interventions were missed, or risk another campaign where headline results are replayed as officiating controversies rather than settled facts of the record.
