When Howard Webb took over as the Premier League referees’ chief in 2022, he promised greater transparency and openness.
Huge strides have been made on that front, and the Match Officials Mic’d Up VAR TV show was a trailblazer among the top European leagues.
It was a logical move from Webb, considering his time as the boss of referees in Major League Soccer prior to his move back to England.
In 2019, MLS became the first league to publicly share VAR audio after matches through a show called Inside VAR – effectively the pre-cursor to Match Officials Mic’d Up in the Premier League.
Attempts to bring audio directly into live matches has proved unsuccessful.
BBC Sport understands some leagues and the lawmakers can’t find a consensus.
Webb has been part of a working group set up to lobby to get the rules relaxed, to eventually enable the audio to be played live.
But the Ifab, who are football’s lawmakers, and in particular Fifa, are not close to being on board with fully pulling back the curtain.
Discussions about changing the regulations regularly stall, with concerns about the quality of communications worldwide, added pressure on officials during reviews and that the credibility of referees could be affected.
Part of the reason is that so many decisions are subjective and open to interpretation. It is possible for someone to disagree with almost any call that is made.
In an interview three years ago, Lukus Brud, the Ifab secretary and chief executive, told BBC Sport that allowing the audio to be played live would be “chaotic” due to the number of people speaking.
Webb is in a unique position as being the only referees’ chief to experiment with live VAR broadcast.
In August 2020, during the MLS is Back Tournament following the Covid shutdown, the league became the only competition to ever broadcast live VAR audio during matches.
It was considered a success, but six years on from that short experiment there have been no further experiments anywhere.
Rather than MLS providing a blueprint for the game to move forward, it proved nothing more that a footnote for VAR.
Webb, of course, can also only go as fast as the Premier League wants to go because refereeing body Pro Ref does not make any unilateral decisions like this.
