‘We invented a VAR system in 1998… but couldn’t afford to build it’

At a train station pub six miles north east of Birmingham, England, Andy Lyden looks over a patent application he had almost forgotten existed for a concept that later changed football.

The West Bromwich Albion supporter and his Aston Villa-supporting friend Dave Evans filed it from Evans’ kitchen table in their hometown of Sutton Coldfield in May 1998. Their system would track players, detect possible offsides and alert referees almost instantly, which they hoped would make football decisions more accurate.

While football would not approve goal-line technology until 2012, conduct its first official semi-live video assistant referee (VAR) trial until 2016 or introduce semi-automated offside at a World Cup until 2022, Lyden and Evans had imagined elements of all three. Not only that, but they also warned that frame-by-frame video reviews would slow the sport down, damaging its tempo and atmosphere.

“We were hoping to make ourselves millionaires, as I suppose quite a lot of young people are,” Lyden says.

It was not their only attempt at invention. Evans, now 69, says the pair were always discussing ideas and that he had previously spent thousands of pounds trying to protect a couple of his own.

Lyden was 31 and Evans 40 when they submitted the application. They had met a few years earlier through Sutton Coldfield Baptist Church, where their families attended and their children, who were of similar ages, grew up together.

The two men lived less than a mile apart and regularly met at Evans’ house, either around the kitchen table or in the office upstairs.

“It was literally just thinking, ‘What do we think is going to happen in the future?’,” Lyden says. “It was around the time I was still getting my head around emails.”

The late 1990s felt like the beginning of a technological transformation. Mobile phones were enormous, and the internet remained a novelty in many British homes. Lyden had a job with electronics company Philips and now works in programme and project management for Rolls-Royce and Jaguar Land Rover. He admits Evans was the more technically minded half of the partnership.

Evans, who now lives in Ramsgate, Kent, worked in the insurance industry as a programmer in C++, a language for building software, and was involved in early methods through which insurers could collect and share information. Nevertheless, he credits Lyden with starting the conversation.

“He was the one who said to me, ‘I’ve been thinking about this’,” Evans says. “We sat down and fleshed out the details.”

“One night, this just came out,” Lyden says. “Football will all be electronically tagged, linesmen will become defunct because you will know when the ball is out and you will know when it has crossed the line.

“Me and Dave would have spent hours and hours talking about how it would be, how it could be and how we saw it in the future.”

They eventually decided to protect the idea, but a patent application is a request for legal rights over an invention and filing one does not mean the technology has been built, tested or approved.

Their application, titled Player Tracking System, was submitted on May 14, 1998. It proposed placing transmitters at fixed points around the pitch, along with fitting each player with a miniature version.

The signals would be sent to a central receiver connected to a computer. For an offside decision, the system would identify when an attacking player had moved beyond the relevant defender and send the information to the official responsible for that half of the pitch.

 

Picture 1, above: from the patent application showing the transmitters attached to the players and the officials for the game represented by black circles. Picture 2, below: how the system would work. (Credit: Andy Lyden)

The patent said officials would carry an “audio/visual device”, although it did not explain exactly what it would look like. Lyden says he and Evans imagined something resembling a modern smartwatch worn on the referee’s wrist that could buzz to alert the official and display information or a replay of the incident. 

“We knew the technology was there because of all the things that were happening with GPS and maps in cars,” Evans says.

The idea came years before the arrival of recognisable smartwatches as Microsoft launched its SPOT watch platform in 2004, while the first Apple Watch was released in 2015.

Cricket had already begun using replay officials — a ‘third umpire’ was first deployed in Test cricket during South Africa’s series against India in 1992 — while rugby league introduced a video referee when Super League began in 1996. Those systems required another official away from the field to review television pictures and communicate a decision.

Lyden and Evans’ patent warned against lengthy frame-by-frame reviews, describing the process as “completely unacceptable” for a high-tempo sport and proposing “split-second analysis” instead.

“Our idea was that it was totally electronic,” Lyden says. “This would give you the decision.

“We tried to think of a system that took humans out of it, and the way they have implemented VAR is that they have added another step, but you still come back to a human decision.

“VAR was introduced to take ambiguity out of decision-making but it actually adds more. They are looking at video evidence 20 times instead of the referee having one moment.”

Evans believes technology has prevented obvious errors, but remains frustrated by marginal offsides and lengthy checks.

“As a football fan, you do get really cheesed off when it takes three minutes to make a decision,” he says. “It can spoil the game.”

The application was published in November 1999, meaning its description and drawings became publicly available, but it never became a granted patent as the application was withdrawn in August 2000 as Lyden and Evans stopped progressing it before securing enforceable rights over the invention.

“It’s always the same thing with ideas like these,” Evans says. “It’s the costs.”

Lyden remembers paying several hundred pounds to submit the application before discovering that the next stage would require a further payment of around £2,000. Neither had the resources to manufacture the equipment or build a working version of the system.

“You could imagine that you’d have spent £20,000 just to set up a demonstration,” Evans says.

“You can have a great idea, but these things are difficult to get off the ground unless you’ve got money that you’re not afraid to lose.”

“We were stupid enough to put a patent in that we couldn’t afford to carry forward,” Lyden says.

Both men had young families and neither could risk losing that amount of money on an idea football might ignore. They also had no contacts in the sport who could help them develop a prototype or place it in front of the Football Association.

The application was left behind, although its publication meant the idea remained publicly available and later patent applications concerning offside detection, player positioning and referee-assistance technology cited Lyden and Evans’ work.

The arrival of similar technology was gradual enough that Evans cannot remember one moment when he realised football had caught up with their discussions. 

“It came in slowly,” he says. “It was talked about for a few years before it was actually implemented.”

“We talked about that 20 years ago,” he says. “Why has it taken so long for these people to see the usefulness of it?”

FIFA conducted its first official semi-live VAR test during France’s 3-1 friendly victory over Italy in Bari in September 2016, before using the system at the Club World Cup three months later.

Hawk-Eye Innovations, which is owned by Sony, was appointed as FIFA’s VAR technology provider in 2017 and now supplies the system to competitions including the Premier League, Serie A and Ligue 1.

The values of its FIFA and Premier League contracts have not been made public, but the scale of the industry is considerable. Germany’s Bundesliga spent €1.8million introducing a VAR system in 2017, while Hawk-Eye — which now operates in 25 sports — recorded revenues of £81.7million and pre-tax profits of £14.8million in the year to March 2025.

Evans jokes that life might have looked rather different had football adopted their system. “I’d be sitting on a beach somewhere,” he says. “Not having to go to work.”

Players are now electronically tracked, offsides are calculated by computers and referees receive signals on wearable devices when the ball crosses the goal line and the delays caused by frame-by-frame video reviews, which Lyden and Evans warned about in 1998, arrived too.

Lyden looks down again at the printouts on the pub table and offers his explanation for why their own system never reached a football pitch.

“We were too early and too skint.”