The VAR Review: Bayern's offside 'goal' vs. Real Madrid - ESPN

Video Assistant Referee causes controversy every week across Europe, and it even crops up in the Champions League.

On Wednesday night, in the second leg of the semifinal between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, the Bundesliga club were desperately searching for an equaliser.

Real Madrid led 2-1, giving them a 3-2 aggregate lead, in the 13th minute of added time (only nine had been signalled). Bayern had to score, but they were thwarted by the offside flag and the referee blew his whistle. Bayern lost 2-1 and were eliminated.

Bayern manager Thomas Tuchel was raging, calling it a «a disastrous decision from the linesman and the referee.»

So what happened, who was to blame, and how does this all work with VAR?

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The ball was played into the Real Madrid area, with Noussair Mazraoui challenging Ferland Mendy. The Los Blancos defender headed the ball away, and as the ball dropped into open space in the area, the assistant, Tomasz Listkiewicz, raised his flag. Referee Szymon Marciniak immediately blew the whistle.

Thomas Müller nodded the ball to Matthijs de Ligt, and he fired into net past Andriy Lunin — though the goalkeeper made no attempt to make a save because of the whistle, so you cannot say Bayern were denied a goal. The Real Madrid defenders may have been affected, too.

Play stopped at the whistle, so there was nothing the VAR could do. This is all about how and when the play should end from a delayed flag.

As no goal was scored, there's no VAR offside situation to judged. So we won't get the semiautomated offside visualisation for this, and we will never know for certain.

But it looks exceptionally close, and Mazraoui may well have been marginally onside to