"Everyone hates it," said Christina Unkel, a former FIFA referee and rules analyst. "According to VAR, that's correct to take that goal away. That's not the spirit of the game. But it's the correct decision by law."
That tension — legally right, spiritually wrong — is the defining argument of this World Cup. VAR has chalked off celebrations, ended national tournaments, and left players standing around while a referee goes off to watch television. More than 100 interventions through the round of 16. Roughly 0.5 overturned decisions per match, higher than the last World Cup and higher than the most recent club season, according to Sofascore data.
And yet, the officials are mostly getting those calls right. That's the maddening part.
When "correct" stops feeling like justice
Croatia's World Cup ended on a goal that was ruled out because Ivan Perisic's cross brushed a teammate's hair — literally — leaving Mario Pasalic fractionally offside when the ball reached him. A sensor inside the match ball confirmed the contact. No human eye could have caught it. The goal was disallowed. Croatia were out.
Iran had three goals disallowed by VAR, one of them for a player who was a single toe offside. Egypt lost a goal for a foul that happened nearly 100 yards from the ball. Belgium got a late penalty for contact so light it barely registered, enough to eliminate Senegal. In each case, the technology was doing exactly what it was designed to do. In each case, it felt wrong.
"What happened to us wasn't fair," said Egypt coach Hossam Hassan. Unkel sympathizes — and she's an official.
Folarin Balogun's red card for the US against Bosnia-Herzegovina might be the most chaotic example. Referee Raphael Claus initially waved it off, then watched a slow-motion replay at VAR's urging and flashed red. FIFA later overturned the one-game ban — only the second time that's happened at a World Cup — creating a controversy that arguably eclipsed the incident itself.
The system was never supposed to work like this
When VAR launched in MLS nearly a decade ago, the language was deliberately modest. "Minimum interference, maximum benefit," as Mark Geiger, now general manager of the Professional Referees Organization, puts it. The goal was to eliminate the obvious, grotesque errors — a handball that keeps out a clear goal, a case of mistaken identity on a red card. Not toenail offsides. Not hair-follicle deflections.
FIFA has doubled down anyway, adding semi-automated offside technology with player-tracking cameras, computer-generated lines, and ball-embedded sensors. The result is a system capable of detecting errors that were genuinely invisible to everyone in the stadium — and then acting on them.
"Look under anything with a microscope, you could probably find something," said US defender Chris Richards. He's right, and that's the problem. The threshold for intervention has drifted so far from "clear and obvious" that it now catches things no one would have noticed, let alone complained about, in any previous era of football.
England coach Thomas Tuchel called VAR decisions in this tournament "very questionable," saying referees "can send any team out in any moment. It's just erratic. It's just unreliable." That came after his own side benefited from video reviews against Mexico, which makes it awkward — but the underlying frustration is real and widely shared.
What Unkel wants is discretion: the ability for referees to weigh the spirit of the game against the letter of the law, the way judges can apply common sense within a legal framework. "Toenail offsides, hair follicle arguments" — she doesn't think those should be part of football. A lot of officials apparently agree with her.
Bruce Arena, who coached the US at the 2002 World Cup, takes the opposite view. He watched Torsten Frings handball a shot off the line with no consequence, costing his team a penalty and potentially a place in the semifinals. "I wish we had it," he said simply. That perspective matters too.
The technology works. That's not really in dispute. Whether football is better for it is a different question entirely — and this World Cup hasn't done much to settle it in VAR's favor.
