September 30, 2023. Luis Díaz puts the ball in the net for Liverpool at Tottenham. In the video room, VAR official Darren England draws the offside lines, sees that Díaz timed his run perfectly, and says so out loud into his headset: check complete. The on-field referee hears it as confirmation of the opposite call. Play restarts under an offside ruling that never should have survived review, and by the time anyone in that video room realizes what just happened, the rules no longer allow them to fix it. Liverpool loses the match.
Nothing about the cameras failed that day. A person did.
This is the next post in our series on AI and machine learning at the 2026 World Cup. The first post laid out the two ways this technology enters the tournament, on the pitch and off it. The second asked whether a model can predict who wins. The third looked at how teams find eligible players nobody else was tracking. The fourth turned to keeping those players healthy once a team had them. This one stays off the pitch and goes after the technology fans actually watch happen in real time, for better and for worse: VAR.
What a Review Costs a Celebration
I asked Finn McCallum, the player and coach I’ve been talking with throughout this series, to walk me through what happens, second by second, when a goal gets sent to review. His breakdown was more granular than I expected. About 15 seconds pass before officials decide to check the goal at all. Another minute or so goes into deciding whether the referee needs to walk over to the pitchside monitor rather than just take the call from the video room. Then the referee stands at the screen for 30 to 60 seconds before making the final ruling.
None of those numbers sound like much on their own. Strung together, they add up to a stretch where a fan who just watched their team score has to stop celebrating, wait, and either start celebrating again from a lower emotional register or accept that the goal never happened. Finn put it simply: once a goal gets called back once, it’s hard to fully celebrate the next one either, since some part of you is now waiting for the review.
Compare that to how other sports handle it. The NFL’s replay challenges and MLB’s manager challenges skip the deliberation step entirely, the review starts the moment someone throws a flag or calls for it. Finn’s read is that VAR’s slowest moments usually aren’t about making the right call, they’re about finding the right camera angle among dozens available in a modern stadium, then watching that angle multiple times even after the correct read is already obvious.
The clearest example from this tournament came in France’s quarterfinal against Morocco. Referee Facundo Tello awarded a penalty after Noussair Mazraoui fouled Kylian Mbappé, then sent it to review anyway. The check ran more than three minutes, long enough that Mbappé had to reset his run-up multiple times before finally taking the kick. Morocco’s goalkeeper saved it. Mbappé later said the back-and-forth over whether the penalty even stood broke his focus more than the wait itself. France won the game anyway, but the moment became the story people remembered.
When the technology actually delivers
Not every review is a slog, and the newer semi-automated offside system is the clearest evidence of that. FIFA’s setup this year pairs dozens of tracking cameras with a sensor built into the adidas match ball, sampling the ball’s motion 500 times a second to pinpoint the exact instant of contact. When FIFA introduced this approach at Qatar 2022, it aimed to cut the average offside decision from around 70 seconds down to 20 or 25, a target set after FIFA’s own pre-tournament trials. This is what Finn’s frustration with slow reviews is actually pointing toward, a system doing its job quietly enough that most fans never notice it happened at all.
The strangest example of that system at work this tournament came in Portugal’s round of 32 win over Croatia. Croatia thought they’d equalized in stoppage time until VAR ruled the buildup offside, based on a touch from Croatian forward Igor Matanović that no camera and no fan in the stadium ever saw. The ball’s sensor caught it. Early reports called it a “hair flick,” but FIFA’s chief refereeing officer later clarified the sensor doesn’t register hair at all, the contact came from Matanović’s head itself, close enough to the offside line to reverse the entire sequence.
No human official could have caught that touch at match speed, camera or no camera. It’s also the kind of call that leaves a fan cold: correct by the letter of the rule, and decided by a signal no one watching could ever have perceived.
Where the humans still get it wrong
Here’s the part that actually explains why so many fans have settled into what Finn called resignation rather than support. The technology can work exactly as designed and the outcome can still feel wrong, or it can fail outright, and from the stands, both look the same. The Díaz call from the top of this post is the second kind. The cameras drew the lines correctly. A person relaying the result into a headset said the opposite of what he meant, under pressure, in real time, and once the referee blew his whistle to restart play, the rules didn’t allow a reversal, no matter how obviously wrong the call turned out to be.
Set that beside Roberto Firmino’s disallowed goal against Aston Villa in 2019, when the review correctly found his armpit fractionally ahead of the last defender. Nothing went wrong there technically. The system did exactly what it was built to do, on a margin so thin that calling it offside felt absurd to nearly everyone watching. Two very different failures, from a fan’s seat, land the same way: a goal that should have counted didn’t.
I’ve spent most of my career trying to convince people that AI is meant to sharpen human judgment, not replace it. This is a hard sell at a barbecue in my small town, where the general assumption is that anything with “machine learning” or “AI” in the name is either a gimmick or a threat. VAR is a strange kind of case study for that argument, because the technology was never designed to make the call. The name says it outright: video assistant referee. The cameras and computer vision behind it can tell you where a player’s foot was and when the ball left it with more precision than any set of human eyes at full speed. What they can’t do is decide what “check complete” should mean when a person says it into a headset under pressure, and that handoff, where the machine’s answer becomes a human’s decision, is exactly where the Díaz call went wrong. The cameras never got it wrong that day. It was the sentence a person spoke into a headset that undid all of it.
The cost of getting it right
Soccer is one of the only major sports built around uninterrupted play, something the first post in this series touched on when it explained why the sport was slow to adopt this kind of technology in the first place. Football has its huddles, basketball its shot clock stoppages, baseball its pitch clock. Soccer has halftime and nothing else. Finn’s framing of the trade was the most useful thing he said all conversation: fans are giving up the sport’s spontaneity and flow in exchange for a lower error rate on subjective calls, and for a lot of people, that isn’t a trade they’d have chosen if anyone had actually asked them.
Most fans, including Finn, will say VAR has made the game more fair, although almost none of them enjoy sitting through it. Those two things are both true at once, and neither one is going away before the final whistle blows on this tournament.
