The FIFA World Cup is in full swing and so are the various controversies. There’s a lot to discuss but I don’t want to get political, so let’s focus on the VAR or Video Assistant Referee. In the old days of football (by which I mean soccer to some of you), you did what you could get away with. If you snuck offsides a bit and the line referee didn’t see you, you’re good. If you get the ball over the goal line and the keeper circles it out as if they caught it and sent it back out, that’s fine if the referee didn’t call the goal. If you miss a header and punch it in with your fist, no problem. It all hinged on did a human referee see it and call it: not an algorithm, not a video replay.

The sport has progressed a lot since those days. We have a camera hovering on fiber-optic cables overhead. We have sensors in the ball that know when it crosses the goal line. We have trackers on the players. We have an action camera on the ref even. More tech has been slowly added to the ‘pure & beautiful’ game. This is the first World Cup where I wondered if a player’s shoe could be redesigned to cause fewer offsides. The technology to find fouls is so common place that when people in the stands don’t see the rendered offsides animation on the jumbotron they start to doubt if there was even a foul. For offsides, if a player is more than 10 cm off the line, the computer triggers the message to the refs that offsides occurred. Less than 10 cm needs a manual review and it is flagged for manual review. We’ve all seen the images of how close someone can be 1 cm offsides for a play or goal to be called back. Needless to say, the offsides rule is not in place to keep a player a few centimeters onside; it is there to keep you from just posting a striker by the goalee and just drive long balls to them for easy one on one faceoffs.

This week we saw 🇪🇬 Egypt face 🇦🇷 Argentina. In a highly publicized incident, there was a scuffle at one side of the pitch where Egypt played the ball forward. They then artfully broke past Argentina’s defenses to beat the keeper and bury a goal. It was fantastic. It was glorious. It was beautiful. And it was called back. The offending play happened some 20+ seconds before and way at the other side of the pitch. It didn’t affect Argentina’s positioning. It didn’t affect the play. Yes a ball was stolen by an Egyptian defender and yes there was some contact. You can call it a toss up on if it was a foul or not but the line ref who was standing not 10 feet away didn’t call it. If there was no goal from Egypt, this would have never been flagged even. And that’s where this gets messy.

For a play to be offsides, it happens from the moment the ball is kicked forward. We have sensors to check all this. For a foul, it is seen or called for by players or the coach. Here the goal caused for people to scream foul. But to rewind the match back in time where the whole field was different and call the whole play invalid does ask: how far back can we go? Messi missed a penalty earlier. This changes the tempo of the match. That’s in the moment. Rewinding to a past moment point to call a foul that wasn’t deemed callable by the line ref to disallow a play just to remove a goal against the favored team further changes the name of the sport and leaves us all asking “What just happened?”. Even the current Mayor of New York City went as far to say Egypt was robbed and we gotta throw out the VAR. Mamdani’s jest aside, Garry Kasparov framed this very well:

I just submitted an op-ed on this to Washington Post, discussing how technology cannot substitute human accountability. We must have transparency, or all the new rules and reviews create more opportunities for interference. With all due respect to one of the best referees in… https://t.co/pLaxaN7ulb

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 9, 2026

Technology cannot substitute human accountability without transparency. What’s happening here is we put in cameras, sensors, and AI to ensure that we can trust the refs and the game. However technology has become the vehicle under which we distrust the game. As officials learn more about how they can use technology in sports, the less likely the spectators are to trust it. With technology, the relationship between literacy and trust is tenuous. Referees need accountability else why do we even need human judgment on the pitch? If there was a balance here, we likely crossed it a while ago or, heaven forbid, even more rules have to be added to the sport to cap how far back you can go to disallow a goal. Until then, I checked the tape and I’m calling back the 1986 goal to England’s favor.