The 2026 World Cup has shown that VAR can do exactly that. It has also shown that correcting more decisions does not automatically make football feel fairer, clearer or more enjoyable.

Breel Embolo was sent off after a review changed a yellow card from an Argentina player to the Swiss forward. Folarin Balogun was dismissed after VAR upgraded his challenge, while Lionel Messi escaped a card for an incident many thought looked similar. Egypt had a goal cancelled against Argentina after officials went back to an earlier foul. Meanwhile, Tim Ream had an incorrect booking removed.

Some of those interventions may have been right. Some remain highly debatable. Together, they leave us with a more important question than whether one referee got one decision wrong:

Is VAR actually helping football?

What was VAR meant to improve?

Before VAR, the sales pitch was easy to understand. Referees are human, football moves quickly and one missed incident can decide a tournament. Give the officials another pair of eyes and the worst mistakes should disappear.

The IFAB protocol therefore limits VAR to four areas: goals, penalties, direct red cards and mistaken identity. It is meant to correct clear and obvious errors, not turn every challenge into a frame-by-frame courtroom drama.

That aim is sensible. Nobody wants a World Cup decided because a referee missed an obvious handball or sent off the wrong player. The difficulty is that football’s most important decisions are not always factual.

Was a toe offside? Technology can usually provide a factual answer.

Was a challenge reckless or did it use excessive force? That is still judgement. Slow motion does not remove subjectivity. Sometimes it merely gives everyone more time to disagree.

VAR can improve what officials see. It cannot make football’s grey areas disappear.

Where VAR is helping

There have been moments at this World Cup when video review did precisely what supporters were promised.

Tim Ream’s overturned yellow card against Paraguay is a good example. Referee Danny Makkelie initially booked Ream after Miguel Almirón went down. The review showed a different story, so Makkelie removed Ream’s card and booked Almirón for simulation.

Without VAR, Ream would have carried an undeserved caution through the group stage. The correction dealt with a specific error, protected the right player and reached a clear outcome. That is video assistance being useful rather than merely present.

The same principle applies to goals and penalties when the replay reveals something the referee could not reasonably see. A clear handball, an unnoticed foul or the wrong player being punished should be corrected. “The referee missed it” is not a charming tradition when a team’s tournament is at stake.

VAR has also made officials more accountable. Decisions can be replayed, reviewed and compared. Refereeing is no longer protected by the old idea that whatever the referee saw must simply be accepted because the whistle has already gone.

So yes: VAR can help football become more accurate.

The harder question is whether it helps often enough—and cleanly enough—to justify what it changes about the game.

Accuracy is not the same as consistency

The strongest criticism of VAR is no longer that it never works. It is that the same technology can appear to produce very different standards.

Balogun’s red card and Messi’s challenge on Aïssa Mandi became the World Cup’s clearest example. Balogun caught Tarik Muharemović on the ankle while the pair competed for the ball in the United States’ win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. VAR intervened and Balogun received a straight red.

Messi had earlier caught Mandi around the calf and Achilles area during Argentina’s win over Algeria. The referee gave a free-kick but no card.

The clips were not identical. Different speed, force, balance and points of contact can justify different punishments. But they looked similar enough that supporters deserved a clear explanation for the gap between a red card and no card at all.

Former FIFA referee Christina Unkel argued that neither challenge should have produced a red. In her view, Messi’s challenge deserved punishment, while Balogun’s did not contain the excessive force needed for a dismissal.

That reading does not support the simple claim that Messi escaped an obvious red. It raises a subtler problem: VAR may have turned one arguable yellow card into a red while leaving another arguable yellow untouched.

This is where VAR struggles to help. It adds extra officials and extra footage, but the underlying judgement remains subjective. Supporters expect technology to create a consistent answer because that is what technology normally does. Football instead gives them several camera angles and the same old disagreement.

When correcting a decision changes the match

The Embolo dismissal against Argentina shows how a review can be defensible in principle and still feel deeply unsatisfactory.

Referee João Pinheiro initially booked Argentina’s Leandro Paredes for a challenge on Embolo. VAR concluded that Embolo had begun to fall before contact and recommended a mistaken-identity review. Pinheiro withdrew Paredes’s yellow and booked Embolo for simulation.

Because Embolo had already been cautioned, the replacement yellow became a red. Switzerland played with ten men for 67 minutes before losing in extra time.

If the referee punished the wrong participant, correcting him sounds fair. That is exactly the sort of mistake video should catch. Yet the phrase “mistaken identity” did little to explain what supporters had just watched. Nobody had confused Embolo with a team-mate. The review had reversed which side of the incident was considered guilty.

The change also carried a consequence far larger than the original decision. VAR did not merely tidy up a booking. It transformed the quarter-final.

Switzerland coach Murat Yakin said the rule had “destroyed the game”. His anger does not prove the officials acted outside the protocol, but it highlights the cost of a process that can be technically available without being widely understood.

VAR helps when it prevents the wrong player being punished. It hurts when nobody can follow how that correction became a sending-off until several pundits have found the right paragraph in the rulebook.

Has VAR made football fairer—or just more suspicious?

Argentina’s run has fuelled the fan label “VARgentina”. Messi received no card against Algeria. Egypt had a goal disallowed in a 3–2 knockout defeat. Embolo’s dismissal left Switzerland with ten men before Argentina won in extra time.

It is understandable that supporters put those incidents together. It is not enough to prove that FIFA instructed referees to favour Argentina or that matches were fixed.

The Egypt decision shows why the gap matters. VAR disallowed Egypt’s apparent second goal after identifying an earlier infringement by Marwan Attia on Lisandro Martínez. The defence of the decision is straightforward: if a foul occurred during the attacking phase, the goal should not stand simply because the referee missed it live.

The criticism is also reasonable. Observers questioned whether the contact met the threshold for a foul, how far back the review went and why apparent contact on Mohamed Salah before Argentina’s third goal did not trigger the same scrutiny.

Egypt manager Hossam Hassan suggested officials wanted Messi and Argentina to remain in the tournament. That was an allegation, not evidence. A disputed intervention can be poor or inconsistent without being part of a conspiracy.

But VAR was meant to reduce these suspicions. Instead, its mixture of lengthy reviews, unexplained thresholds and selective-looking interventions can make supporters wonder not only whether the referee was wrong, but why the video officials chose to become involved at all.

A system designed to settle arguments is now generating arguments about the system itself.

The problem is bigger than the screen beside the pitch

Balogun’s case also showed that VAR cannot carry football’s credibility on its own.

His dismissal normally meant an automatic one-match ban. After US president Donald Trump said he had telephoned FIFA president Gianni Infantino and asked for a review, FIFA used its disciplinary rules to suspend the ban for a one-year probationary period. Balogun was allowed to face Belgium.

This was not a VAR reversal. The red card remained; FIFA suspended its consequence afterwards. Yet to supporters, the distinction may have felt academic. A player was dismissed, a president called FIFA and the player became available for the next match.

Balogun may not have deserved the red card. FIFA’s disciplinary committee may also have possessed the legal power it used. But changing a suspension after the US president publicly asked FIFA’s chief for a review creates an appearance-of-independence problem, even though Infantino said the disciplinary bodies acted independently.

UEFA said the decision had “crossed a red line”. Belgium challenged it and FIFA rejected the appeal.

This matters to the main question because VAR does not operate in isolation. It sits inside football institutions whose explanations, disciplinary decisions and relationships all affect whether people trust the technology. A perfect replay cannot make an opaque process look independent.

What VAR is taking away

The debate is not only about accuracy.

Football depends on flow, spontaneity and the shared release of a goal. VAR has introduced the habit of waiting. A player scores, the crowd erupts, and then everyone glances towards the referee as if the celebration needs planning permission.

That pause may be worth accepting when it corrects an obvious injustice. It becomes harder to justify when several minutes of slow motion produce a decision no more convincing than the original one.

There is also a change in how the game feels. Referees can appear less authoritative because a distant team may reopen a decision. Players appeal for reviews. Supporters scrutinise every contact knowing that one angle might suddenly become decisive.

None of this means football was better when major errors went uncorrected. Nostalgia has a very selective highlights package. It does mean VAR should be judged by more than the percentage of decisions it technically gets right.

A system can improve accuracy while reducing clarity, rhythm and trust. Whether that trade is worthwhile depends on how often it intervenes and how well it communicates.

So, is VAR helping football?

Sometimes. Not enough yet.

It helps when the error is clear, the intervention is quick and the explanation makes sense. Ream’s corrected booking is the clean version: wrong player punished, replay clarifies the incident, decision fixed.

It helps less when subjective judgements are treated as if a monitor has made them scientific. Balogun and Messi show that additional footage does not guarantee a consistent threshold. Embolo shows that a legitimate correction can have a huge and poorly understood consequence. Egypt’s disallowed goal shows how uncertainty grows when one passage receives intense review and another appears not to.

The answer is not necessarily to scrap VAR and return to pretending referees have panoramic vision. It is to narrow and improve it.

Football could help by:

• keeping interventions focused on genuinely clear errors rather than debatable alternatives;
• publishing short, plain-English explanations for major tournament decisions;
• releasing referee and VAR audio after matches where practical;
• using stadium announcements that explain the offence, not merely name a protocol category;
• applying the same review threshold regardless of team, player or stage;
• preventing disciplinary processes from appearing vulnerable to political access.

VAR should be an emergency correction system, not a second referee searching for a different opinion.

Dadbot take

The technology is not ruining football, and it is not rescuing it either.

VAR has fixed real mistakes. That matters. But football sold it as a route to fairness and certainty, when what it actually provides is better evidence for human beings who still disagree.

The 2026 World Cup’s lesson is not that every Argentina decision was corrupt or every review was wrong. It is that accuracy without transparency does not create trust. Sometimes it creates a more elaborate form of doubt.

If VAR wants to help football, supporters should understand why it has intervened before the replay package reaches its fourth angle and the group chat reaches DEFCON 1.

Final thought

Football can survive human error because everyone understands that humans make mistakes.

What is harder to accept is a system that pauses the match, studies the evidence and still leaves people unsure whether the same rules apply next time.

VAR is helping football see more. The next job is helping football make better, quicker and more understandable decisions with what it sees.

Sources and caveats

This article reflects reporting available on 12 July 2026. It uses the IFAB Laws and VAR protocol alongside reporting from the Guardian, TNT Sports and Al Jazeera. Allegations of favouritism or political influence are attributed to the people and organisations making them. No available evidence cited here proves match-fixing or an instruction to favour Argentina.