The review official sees what the director chose to keep

Video review depends on a broadcast feed built for storytelling, which means camera planning has become an officiating decision.

No governing body owns its own cameras. Almost none of them, anyway. The pictures a review official studies are produced by a host broadcaster whose job is to make a match watchable, with a director choosing shots in real time, an operator following the ball, and a truck full of people optimising for narrative rather than evidence.

Then a decision has to be proven or overturned from that material.

The consequence is that camera positions are now officiating infrastructure, and hardly anybody treats them that way. If the goal-line camera is on the wrong side, if there is no dedicated wide shot held for the whole phase, if the only angle of a foul is a long lens that flattens depth, the review is limited before it starts. The official is not being asked whether the offence occurred. They are being asked whether the available pictures show it clearly enough, which is a question about production budgets in disguise.

Competitions know this and respond by mandating a minimum camera count for reviewable fixtures. That helps at the top level. Below it, the same rulebook is being enforced with a fraction of the coverage, which means the standard of proof effectively varies with the size of the broadcast contract. A challenge that succeeds in a marquee match fails in a midweek one, not because the officials disagree but because one of them had six angles and the other had two.

There is a subtler distortion in the choice of what gets recorded at all. Directors cut to reaction shots. A player's face, a manager on the touchline, a crowd. Those cuts happen exactly during the seconds after an incident, which are often the seconds when the evidence of a second offence, an off-the-ball incident, a retaliation, would have been visible on the wide.

I would make the unbroken wide shot a regulatory requirement, recorded continuously, never cut, available to the review booth and to nobody else in real time.

It would cost one camera and one recorder per venue. Set against the amount of argument it would settle, that is nothing.

Right now the sport is asking a referee to adjudicate from footage assembled by someone whose main obligation is to keep the audience entertained, and then acting surprised when the decisive angle does not exist.