"Everyone hates it." That's not a fan on social media. That's Christina Unkel, a former FIFA referee and rules analyst, summing up the mood around VAR at this summer's World Cup. Hard to argue with her.
Over 100 VAR interventions through the round of 16. Roughly 0.5 overturned decisions per match — higher than the last World Cup, higher than the most recently completed club season. The system designed to catch "clear and obvious errors" is now catching toe-offside calls that require space-age ball sensors to detect. That was never the brief.
Goals that lived and died in a video booth
Croatia's elimination is the image that defined this tournament's relationship with technology. Ivan Perisic's desperate cross cannoned around the box and somehow found the net. Pandemonium. Then silence. Referee Espen Eskas walked to the monitor, watched the replay, and ruled that the ball had grazed Igor Matanovic's hair — putting Mario Pasalic offside. The contact was invisible to the human eye. A sensor inside the ball confirmed it. Croatia were out.
Iran had three goals ruled out by VAR in total. Belgium got a late penalty against Senegal for contact that, at full speed, most referees would wave away. Egypt had a goal disallowed for a foul that happened nearly 100 yards from where the ball was. "What happened to us wasn't fair," said Egypt coach Hossam Hassan. Unkel agreed — then immediately explained why it was technically correct by law. That gap between legality and fairness is exactly where the problem lives.
The most explosive incident involved American forward Folarin Balogun, who was shown a red card after VAR encouraged referee Raphael Claus to review a stomp on Bosnia's Tarik Muharemovic — footage watched in slow motion, a speed at which almost anything looks worse. FIFA then lifted Balogun's suspension, only the second time that's happened at a World Cup. The intervention to correct the intervention to correct the original decision. You genuinely couldn't write it.
The original mission has been left behind
Mark Geiger, who helped implement VAR in MLS and now runs the Professional Referees Organization, still believes in the system. But he's clear about where it's drifted. "The whole genesis of VAR was not to fix every mistake or to make the referees perfect," he said. "They should be asking themselves, 'is the referee clearly and obviously wrong?'" Hair follicle offsides and peripheral fouls 100 yards from the ball are not what anyone had in mind.
England coach Thomas Tuchel, burned by video reviews in the round of 16, put it bluntly: "The referees can send any team out in any moment. It's just not good enough. It's just erratic. It's just unreliable."
Unkel's preferred fix is giving referees the discretion to override VAR when common sense and the spirit of the game demand it — the same way judges apply judgment rather than robotically following the letter of the law. "Toenail offsides, hair follicle arguments" — she wants officials empowered to say no. Most of her peers, she believes, feel the same way.
The counter-argument exists. Bruce Arena, who coached the 2002 U.S. side, still wishes VAR had been around when Torsten Frings handled a shot on the line against the Americans in the quarterfinals — a blatant handball missed in real time that cost the U.S. a penalty and a red card. "Why not make decisions correct?" Arena said. It's a fair point. The problem isn't the principle. It's the version of the system FIFA has deployed in 2026, one that treats a strand of hair as match-defining evidence while simultaneously killing the spontaneous joy that makes football worth watching in the first place.
Unkel said it best: "According to VAR, that's correct to take that goal away. That's not the spirit of the game."
