Clear and obvious depends on how far the picture zooms

A threshold written to limit interference is applied to footage whose magnification and frame rate are chosen by a broadcaster.

The standard sounds strict. Do not overturn unless the error is clear and obvious. It was drafted to stop review officials re-refereeing matches from a booth, and in principle it protects the on-field decision.

In practice it is defined by a zoom control.

Freeze a contact at real speed on a wide shot and almost nothing is clear. Take the same contact at two hundred frames a second, magnified until a shin fills the screen, and a brush of studs becomes a visible assault. Neither picture is dishonest. They produce opposite answers to the question the rule asks, and the review official chooses, or is handed, one of them.

That is why the same threshold produces such different outcomes between competitions. Some review protocols instruct officials to watch at full speed first and only then look closer. Some do not. Some restrict the number of angles. The written standard is identical across all of them and the enforcement is not, which tells you the standard is not doing the work everyone assumes it is.

Slow motion has a specific distorting property that officials are trained on and audiences are not. It exaggerates the appearance of intent. A player who reacts in a tenth of a second looks, at one twentieth of speed, like somebody who had time to consider. Any decision that turns on recklessness is therefore being made on footage that systematically overstates the very thing being judged.

I would write the viewing method into the law rather than the guidance. Full speed, wide, twice, then one closer angle only if a question remains. Make deviating from that a procedural error a club can complain about.

There is an accountability angle too. Because clear and obvious is a subjective threshold applied to selected footage, a review official can almost never be shown to have been wrong. They can only be said to have taken a different view, which is unfalsifiable and therefore useless as a basis for assessment.

A rule that cannot be breached cannot be enforced against the person applying it.

That, more than any individual controversy, is why supporters no longer believe the threshold means anything.