😳 Arsenal helped by VAR? Uproar in Premier League, West Ham and fans 🤬 | OneFootball

The incident that took place in the final minutes of West Ham-Arsenal is bound to be debated for a long time yet.

Watch the entire Serie BKT live on OneFootball for just €9.99 a month. Click here to buy the LaB Channel Monthly Pass with no automatic renewal.

The decision made by referee Chris Kavanagh, after being called over by the VAR room, has in fact left huge doubts and will prove extremely significant for the balance of the championship. A choice that will, in effect, impact both the Premier League title race between Arsenal and Manchester City, and the relegation battle involving two historic and prestigious clubs such as West Ham and Tottenham.

💥 1-1 in the 95th minute: VAR calls the referee over for Raya-Pablo contact

Let’s go through what happened in order. In the penultimate minute, West Ham dramatically found an equaliser against Arsenal through Collum Wilson.

The move came from a corner: Raya completely mistimed his attempt to come out, the ball struck the Hammers forward and ended up in the net. From there, the Arsenal players immediately began protesting, asking for a foul on the goalkeeper. VAR checked the incident and called the referee over for an on-field review.

❌ After the OFR, Kavanagh disallows West Ham’s goal amid protests

Kavanagh was called to the monitor and, from the moment of the goal to the final decision, a full five minutes passed. During the on-field review — as reported by Sky Sports — as many as 17 different frames were analysed, with the focus placed on the contact between Raya and Pablo, who extended his arm into the Arsenal goalkeeper.

For the referee, that intervention was enough to rule out West Ham’s goal. At that point, furious protests erupted from the Hammers, while Arsenal breathed a huge sigh of relief.

🤬 West Ham FURIOUS: Wilson quotes Mou, Bowen blasts after the match

"I prefer not to speak" by Jose Mourinho: that is the snapshot used by the scorer of the disallowed goal, Callum Wilson, on his Instagram. An image that speaks volumes, just like the words of Hammers captain Jarrod Bowen after the match:

"You can’t just barge into a goalkeeper, of course, but Raya came out to claim the ball and has to expect a bit of contact. This is the Premier League: physical contact is part of the game. My feeling is that if you look at an incident long enough, you’ll always find something to give as a foul. Anyone who knows football knows it remains a physical sport. If that’s a foul, then it has to be one every week. The real problem is understanding where the line is and what the standard actually is.”

West Ham manager Nuno Espírito Santo also hit out strongly, arguing that nowadays “no one understands anymore what is and isn’t a foul” in today’s football.

👊 Arteta defends referee and VAR: "Clear foul, right decision"

As expected, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta defended the VAR decision to disallow Wilson’s goal. “When you look at the footage there’s no doubt, it’s a clear foul. They were very brave,” he said after the match.

📺 The controversy explodes: pundit review and criticism of the decision

This incident is being discussed everywhere, raising huge doubts not so much because of the contact itself, but because of the context of the move and the refereeing standard applied in the Premier League.

Particularly harsh, in this sense, was the analysis by The Athletic, which described the scene as “the perfect image of the 2025-26 Premier League”.

According to the outlet, it was right to punish Pablo’s contact on Raya — held by the forearm while trying to come out — but the real problem was the total chaos in West Ham’s penalty area: at the same time, there were said to have been at least three other obvious fouls involving pushes, holding and mutual blocks, including Rice’s two-arm shove on Mavropanos.

From this came the newspaper’s provocative reflection: VAR spent five minutes in front of the screens trying to figure out “who was fouling whom,” in a situation compared to “a Super Bowl game”.

The Telegraph was on the same line, pointing the finger at refereeing inconsistency: it recalled the goal scored by Arsenal at Old Trafford last August, when Saliba was said to have impeded and “used his elbow” on Altay Bayindir in the move that led to Calafiori’s goal, without any VAR review. It wrote that “inconsistent officiating is at the heart of the controversy”.

Our own Gianpaolo Calvarese also weighed in on the matter, likewise highlighting the inconsistency of the English refereeing line: similar contacts in the Premier League often go unpunished. For the former referee, however, the main issue remains the endless length of the VAR review: the longer a check goes on for incidents like this, the more controversy and tension inevitably increase (HERE IS HIS OPINION).

On social media, the controversy has exploded and promises to drag on for a long time, amid analysis, accusations and endless debate. All of it while the Premier League approaches its final, decisive matchdays: a title race in which, in the end, VAR may have had a huge and decisive impact.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇮🇹 here.

📸 Alex Pantling - 2026 Getty Images