VAR, Kayfabe and Why Assessment can Feel Fake

Rick Rubin once said that professional wrestling is “real” and everything else is fake. Wrestling is honest about its kayfabe – the shared pretence that what you’re watching is a contest, even though everyone involved knows it’s scripted. The fiction is part of the product.

Football, especially in the VAR era, has a harder problem. When BBC Sport reports that the Premier League’s own panel has logged more than 20 VAR mistakes and over 50 total refereeing errors this season, it quietly admits something the packaging tries to hide. The lines on the screen, the slow‑motion replays, the “checking possible penalty” captions all perform objectivity, but the underlying decisions are still messy, human judgement calls. Penalties and red cards are not rule calls; they are arguments about intent, force and what kind of game we want to see.

That is where the kayfabe comes in. On the inside, everyone knows this. Referees, VAR officials and the league understand that even after review there will be disagreements and admitted errors. On the outside, fans are invited to experience VAR as if it were a fairness machine, correcting “clear and obvious” mistakes and delivering something close to neutral truth. When the Key Match Incidents panel then publishes a running total of acknowledged errors, the illusion cracks. Supporters don’t just think the ref had a bad day; they feel that the whole performance of objectivity was fake.

Rubin’s line lands because it flips the usual story. Wrestling is “real” in the sense that it is honest about being a show. Football is “fake” when it pretends that fundamentally subjective judgements have been turned into clean, mechanical facts. The trouble starts when the audience can see both layers at once: the theatrics of certainty and the reality of fallible judgement.

Exactly the same tension exists in high‑stakes assessment. Insiders know that grading essays, portfolios and performances is a judgement call, and that a significant minority of grades would change on re‑mark. Outsiders are encouraged to treat those grades as solid, objective facts that precisely reflect a candidate’s ability. That, too, is a kind of educational kayfabe. The introduction of AI into assessment will make this situation worse.

The way out, in sport and in education, is not to double down on the illusion. It is to admit that these are judgement calls and then show, very plainly, how those calls are being made as well as possible. More independent eyes. Better‑designed comparisons. Transparent error data. Deliberate work on noise and bias. That is why I’m interested in approaches like Adaptive Comparative Judgement and tools such as RM Compare: they don’t pretend to remove judgement; they treat it as real, and they design a process around it.

Wrestling owns its kayfabe. VAR and exam systems would be healthier if they stopped pretending they don’t have any.

Image: Photo by Claudia Raya on Unsplash