"What's happening isn't fair." Egypt coach Hossam Hassan said it plainly after his side lost 3-2 to Argentina in the round of 16, undone by a VAR disallowance for a foul at the other end of the pitch and a penalty shout that went unchecked. He was furious. He also wasn't wrong to be asking questions.
The 2026 World Cup was supposed to showcase FIFA's technological evolution. Instead, it has become a referendum on whether anyone actually wants this much intervention in the game.
From Balogun to Gvardiol: the decisions that defined the tournament
The controversies haven't been isolated incidents. They've been a pattern. Folarin Balogun was sent off for a foul the referee missed in real time — a VAR intervention so contentious it prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to personally contact FIFA President Gianni Infantino to have the ban overturned. England's Jarell Quansah was dismissed in similar fashion. Thomas Tuchel, whose side somehow survived a 3-2 thriller against Mexico despite playing with ten men and conceding a VAR penalty, came out swinging: "Is this a clear and obvious error for the penalty? For sure not."
Then there was Croatia versus Portugal. Josko Gvardiol scored in the 13th minute of stoppage time to level at 2-2 — except VAR ruled it out because a sensor inside the ball detected contact with Igor Matanovic's hair, placing his teammate offside. Hair. The ball didn't visibly deviate. The touch wasn't visible to anyone watching. But the data said otherwise, and Croatia were out.
Luka Modric ended his 24-year World Cup journey with a 2-1 defeat and a verdict that cut to the heart of the problem: "If it's a 200% mistake, then you intervene. If it's not, if it's in a grey area, then there's no reason to get involved."
The Croatian federation — supporters of VAR in principle — have since written to FIFA calling the call "an abuse of technology."
The numbers are hard to ignore
There were 20 VAR interventions across 64 matches at the 2018 World Cup, and fewer than 30 at Qatar 2022. This tournament, which runs to 104 games, dwarfed those totals in its early stages alone. Red cards have more than tripled compared to the previous two editions, with 13 shown through the round of 16 — though that's across 94 games versus 64.
FIFA referees' chief Pierluigi Collina deliberately expanded VAR's scope for 2026, adding four new areas where officials in the television booth could intervene. His defence of the Egypt disallowance was unequivocal: "We believe that a foul is a foul. Regardless of whether the foul appears 'obvious', if the referee did not see it on the field of play, the VAR can intervene."
Network scientist Brennan Klein, whose team at Northeastern University has been analysing data throughout the tournament, sees it differently. "This kind of dystopian future of over-refereeing everything kind of fails to address what it's originally designed to intervene on," he told Reuters. "Fans in the stadium, by and large, just hate this... fans seem to be voting with their boos."
VAR was originally conceived as a fix for moments like Maradona's Hand of God — goals that were obviously wrong, decisions that were unambiguously corrupt or mistaken. What it has become at this World Cup is something else entirely: a system that can disallow goals for hair contact and send players off for fouls invisible to the referee standing five metres away. The gap between the original promise and the current reality is now too wide to paper over with press releases.
Anyone backing underdogs at this tournament has had extra reason to sweat — not just over the football, but over what the booth might decide in the final minutes. That uncertainty isn't a feature. It's the whole problem.
