William Hill have been tracking VAR decisions since the first Premier League review in August 2019 – when Gabriel Jesus had a goal disallowed against West Ham.
From the first two Premier League seasons involving VAR, we’ve logged all interventions and collated reactionary metrics such as tweet volume, sentiment, articles generated, and level of engagement.
The sources we used include ESPN, Premier League and Twitter, while sports news reporting data was gathered using platform insights tool, BuzzSumo. Reactionary metrics comprise data from the day of the incident, plus the following four days.
This has enabled us to create Credible or VAR-cical? and include a controversy rating for each decision.