On Clyde 1 Superscoreboard last night there was an interesting debate concerning the future of VAR - apparently the scope of its use is due to be significantly expanded at this year's World Cup, and the question was whether that would be the end, of if we'd see further expansions in scope.
I'm reasonably convinced that the answer to that is not only that it will be massively expanded in scope, but in the next few years we'll start to see AI-assisted refereeing, where the AI has been trained on the last several years of video footage, will 'watch' the game in real time, and will make all sorts of rulings. Indeed, there may come a point where the AI referee becomes the primary authority in the running of the game, although we're some way away from that just now.
In theory, this actually represents a good thing - at the moment, the biggest problems with VAR are that the checks seem to take ages (certainly, far too long), and they're all-too-often still wrong. Switching to an AI assistant should lead to much quicker turnaround and should, again in theory, see them become much more accurate.
(That said, they'll need to be very careful in how they train the AI, or they'll see them much more likely to award decisions to the 'big' team over the 'smaller' one. Or maybe the opposite...)
But all of that is a few years away... though maybe only a few. I think there's a reasonably good chance that we may see an AI assistant being tried out at the Women's World Cup in 2031, in advance of its being rolled out more generally after that.
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