How LiveU Levelled the VAR Playing Field for OFC

Chris Dredge, Country and Sales Manager, LiveU

The Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) is marking its 62nd year, a milestone that reflects over six decades of growing the world’s most popular sport in one of the most geographically vast and culturally diverse regions. The smallest of FIFA’s six confederations, the OFC comprises 11 Member Associations and two Associate Members and is responsible for the development and organisation of football across the South Pacific.

Beyond organising regional qualifiers for all FIFA World Cup tournaments, the OFC’s General Secretariat plays a vital educational role, equipping coaches referees and sports administrators at every level of the game, from grassroots community football to elite international competition.

The scale of that remit is considerable. The OFC’s Member Associations are scattered across thousands of kilometres of ocean, from Fiji and Papua New Guinea in the west to Tahiti in the east, with many national teams and officials travelling for days, across multiple flights, simply to reach a match. Pacific football has always had to contend with distance, cost and logistics as fundamental features of the game, long before technology entered the equation.

It’s against this backdrop of distance and dispersal that VAR, one of football’s most significant recent inventions, has posed a particular challenge. The officiating and replay technology was first trialled in a competitive match in the Netherlands in September 2016, before being formally written into football’s Laws of the Game by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in March 2018. It made its FIFA World Cup debut later that year, and has since been adopted across competitions worldwide. Despite this rapid global rollout, deployment has remained heavily concentrated in leagues with fixed broadcast infrastructure, and high-capacity connectivity, leaving the Pacific, among the more logistically remote footballing regions, without access to the technology.

For years, the OFC had been the only FIFA confederation operating without VAR, a gap raised directly with FIFA, only to conclude that traditional deployment was effectively impossible for Pacific football. Standard broadcast equipment freighted across the region faced repeated customs delays and damage at island ports, and high-capacity fibre doesn’t exist across island nations like Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Samoa and Tahiti. Any fixed-infrastructure approach was unworkable before a ball was even kicked.

“We were the only confederation in the world without VAR, and we knew, with traditional models, it would never happen for us. When I saw it working for the first time, I realized, this can work. Now, we can take the system as baggage on a plane and deliver VAR anywhere. For us, accessibility is everything. It’s not just about technology, it’s about people solving problems together,” says Kevin Stoltenkamp, OFC Head of Refereeing.

When VAR was mandated for the OFC’s newly launched Pro League – spanning eight teams from seven nations, LiveU made remote VAR possible for the first time.

Working closely with the OFC’s refereeing and technology teams, LiveU designed and built a complete end-to-end remote integration system to support the Hawk-Eye VAR platform: two portable transmission kits and a centralized receiving server in the Auckland hub, supporting up to 12 simultaneous camera feeds with four return feeds carrying integrated two-way referee communications back to the field. The entire system achieves approximately one second of round-trip latency between remote Pacific venues and the Auckland hub, meeting FIFA’s professional standards at a fraction of the cost of any comparable fixed-infrastructure deployment.

“We needed something lightweight, portable, and capable of delivering multiple camera feeds with audio, without relying on freight. Within a very short time, we realized we could transmit broadcast-quality signals across even the most challenging networks. What we’ve built is a low-cost, high-quality VAR solution that’s unique in world football. We went from manually editing clips on a hill to delivering full VAR capability, that’s the scale of change,” says Kelvin Lewis, OFC Referee Technology Lead.

Each LiveU transmission kit was engineered specifically for travel, designed to pass through check-in as standard baggage, with every component individually weight-checked to stay within airline limits. Deployable by a single operator over managed internet connections, the kits require no freight, no permanent infrastructure, and no specialist engineers on the ground.

The deployment was built so that local Pacific Island technicians could own and operate it independently.

“The system is simple to use, you don’t need to be highly technical to operate it. LiveU is the heart of the system… the technology is essential to making this work,” says Mihaly Fabian, OFC VAR Project Manager.

The OFC evaluated several technology suppliers before selecting LiveU – ultimately choosing it because the solution was built on LiveU’s existing platform rather than a custom build. The system achieved a 100% success rate across all proof-of-concept deployments, with issues diagnosed and resolved remotely from Auckland without the need for engineers on the ground at Pacific Island venues.

The deployment has already expanded beyond the OFC Pro League – deployed for the New Zealand Football FIFA Series and OFC’s Women’s World Cup qualifying semifinals in Hamilton and final in Auckland, a FIFA-sanctioned competition. The next deployment takes the system to Tahiti.

The OFC now has a working blueprint: broadcast-quality remote VAR, deployable anywhere, with no freight, no fixed infrastructure, and no specialist engineers on the ground. The attention this has already drawn from beyond Oceania tells you everything, changing the conversation for sports organizations everywhere.