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This article explores the links between the development of the video assistant referee (VAR) in association football and communications strategies used by television. Interviews, archives, and newspaper articles show that TV stations and their programs have played a role, often using highly polemical rhetoric, in the appearance of VARs. For many actors in the sports entertainment industry, VARs continue to be a controversial innovation. Such actors make recurrent arguments that are polarizing and sometimes contradictory.