The 2026 World Cup delivered five weeks of compelling football and converted plenty of skeptics. It also put three of football's most frustrating rules under a global microscope — and they didn't hold up well.
Offside is the worst offender. Not the concept itself — nobody wants strikers camped on the goalkeeper's toes — but the current application, where VAR freezes frames to determine whether a player's armpit or pinkie toe crossed an invisible line. Several legitimate goals were disallowed this tournament for margins no human eye could detect in real time. That's not officiating. That's a geometry exam.
The offside rule is punishing the wrong team
Football is the only major sport that actively rewards a defense for getting caught flat-footed. If a striker gets behind the backline before the ball is played, the goal doesn't count — full stop, no nuance. In the World Cup final, Spain's Ferran Torres had his feet level with Argentina's defender, gained no meaningful advantage, and still had a would-be highlight-reel goal chalked off because his head and shoulder were fractionally ahead.
Hockey handles this better. Once the puck crosses into the attacking zone, players can move freely — cherry-picking is still prevented, but the offense gets the benefit of the doubt. Football could adopt a similar standard: if any part of the attacker's body is onside, the play stands. That one change alone would have kept several legitimate goals on the board this tournament. Naturally, that shifts the risk profile for anyone backing low-scoring draws — markets that have historically benefited from the defensive bias baked into the current rule.
Penalties are the second problem. The punishment is the same whether a defender clips an attacker with zero chance of scoring or cynically hauls down a striker clean through on goal. Both result in a kick from 12 yards with a 70-80% conversion rate. That's not a sliding scale — it's a blunt instrument.
Red cards break games in ways that help nobody
Spain's Lamine Yamal crashed into a challenge with no realistic scoring opportunity. A French defender's clearing attempt caught him below the waist. Penalty. Converted. The decision was technically correct under the current rules, which is precisely the problem — the rules themselves are wrong.
A tiered penalty system makes obvious sense: full penalty kick for fouls that deny a clear scoring opportunity, a spot kick from the edge of the box (18 yards) or indirect free kick for incidental contact. It introduces proportionality where there currently is none.
Red cards follow the same logic of overkill. A player is dismissed, suspended for the next match, and his team finishes the game with ten men — often after a decision made only by VAR review, not visible to anyone in real time. Hockey again: players serve timed penalties, power plays are awarded, but the numerical disadvantage doesn't last the entire match. Football has no equivalent.
- Offside: give the benefit of the doubt to the attacker, not the defense
- Penalties: introduce a graded system based on severity and scoring probability
- Red cards: allow teams to replace the dismissed player after a set period, particularly for VAR-only decisions
None of this will happen quickly. FIFA moves slowly, and football's rules carry the weight of 150 years of tradition. But the World Cup drew the biggest global audience the sport may ever get in North America, and what a lot of those viewers saw was goals being disallowed by millimetre measurements and matches decided by fouls that bore no relation to the punishment they received. That's not a great advertisement for the rulebook.
