By Cheché Vidal
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In my book, Fair Competition, I explain how the quality of sports governance is essential to the pursuit of the excellence that defines Fair Play, and how the correct use of technology is an essential part of that governance in modern sport.
I explore this idea further in my special Substack series on the Winter Olympic Games, in the article “Technology, Competition, and Fair Play”: sports technology, including tools that use artificial intelligence, helps human beings measure, but not judge. The example then was modest but globally visible: a suspected double touch of the stone during a curling match between Canada and Sweden, which neither the cameras nor the players themselves fully resolved. That example illustrated something more: technology does not only measure with greater precision than a human being; it also amplifies, through television and social media, not just the outcome of a play, but the manner in which one competes. The greater our technological dependence for a competition’s external justice, the greater the demand for the internal conscience of those who take part in it.
That reality connects with an idea I had already raised, in more general terms, in another Substack article, “Democracy, Meritocracy & DEI: A Perspective from Fair Competition”: no competition, like no athlete, can aspire to perfection, because perfection does not exist; what we demand of both is the constant pursuit of excellence, even, and especially, in their most imperfect moments.
The 2026 World Cup put that demand to the test once again through a VAR review that lasted only a few seconds and yet reveals something deeper about how contemporary football confuses measuring with judging.
The round-of-16 match between Argentina and Egypt, played on July 7 in Atlanta, had all the ingredients of an upset, and also of a drama built in layers. Egypt was leading 1-0 when, in the 58th minute, Mostafa Ziko scored on a counterattack that would have made it 2-0. The goal was disallowed after a VAR review. Nine minutes later, in the 67th minute, Ziko himself scored again, this time without objection, to make it 2-0, the very score his first goal had already given Egypt before it was taken away. Argentina pulled one back in the 79th minute, Messi equalized in the 83rd, and a third Argentine goal in stoppage time sealed a 3-2 comeback.
The official statistics for that stretch of the match tell a story of dominance without efficiency: Argentina held 57% of possession to Egypt’s 34% (the remainder contested)[i], took nineteen shots at Egypt’s goal to just five Egyptian attempts, seven of those nineteen Argentine shots were on target, against only two of Egypt’s five, and won six corners to Egypt’s one. That dominance explains in part why Egypt spent much of the match sitting back, defending space rather than contesting the ball in Argentine territory.
That context also reveals how disciplined Egypt’s defensive approach actually was: despite defending for most of the match, Egypt committed fewer fouls than Argentina (11 to 13), the team that dominated possession, not the one defending, interrupted play with contact more often. The fact matters: the contact that voided Ziko’s first goal did not occur in a match Egypt played dirty, but in one where fouls were distributed almost evenly in both directions of the pitch.
Following an Argentine appeal, video assistant referee Jérôme Brisard rewound the footage to a contact that had occurred seventeen seconds before the goal[ii], an eternity in a counterattack, and ninety meters away, in the other half of the pitch: Marwan Attia had pulled Lisandro Martínez’s shirt and, in doing so, stepped on his foot, while the Argentine was trying to beat two opponents to start the move. Brisard determined that the contact marked the start of the attacking phase that ended in a goal, and that it constituted a foul. Ziko’s first goal, the one that would have put the match away early, was disallowed.
Minutes later, that same discretion resurfaced, this time at the opposite end of the pitch. In the buildup to Enzo Fernández’s decisive goal, in the 90th+2 minute, two incidents took place inside the Argentine box in quick succession: a shirt pull on Hamdy Fathy by Alexis Mac Allister, uncalled, and seconds later a contact by Julián Álvarez on Mohamed Salah’s foot, which Egypt claimed as a penalty and which referee Francois Letexier also declined to award. In neither case did VAR call for a pitch side monitor review, the same step that had been taken minutes earlier to disallow Ziko’s goal. Argentina won back the ball and scored the goal that sealed the comeback.
Football is, as Paul Gardner defined it in his book The Simplest Game: The Intelligent Fan’s Guide to the World of Soccer (1976), the simplest game, and that simplicity extends, or should extend, to its administration and its officiating. Unlike other sports, where the official is limited to measuring, marking lines, counting seconds, confirming positions, in football the referee judges from inside the field, as a central participant in the game itself. That dual role, administrative and evaluative, carried out by someone who runs alongside the players rather than presiding from a booth, is part of the secret of the sport’s popularity: players and fans alike have accepted the referee’s limitations as intrinsic to the game, not as a flaw to be corrected.
There’s a well-known saying among referees: you know one has done a good job when you barely noticed them during the match. Introducing technology that promises to measure with greater precision is, in that sense, a bittersweet solution: it helps measure better and, in appearance, be fairer to competitors, but it also makes the task of measuring, and of judging on the basis of that measurement, more complex. That is why keeping the use of technology simple and effective is key if the sport hopes to reach its fullest managerial excellence, especially in an age when video, broadcast publicly to the entire world, allows any fan to judge the same play with the same camera angles as the referee, or better ones.
And that is where this case connects to a central premise of my book and my Substack articles: technology does not judge, it only measures. What happened in the 58th minute, and what did not happen in the 90th+2, was not the discovery, or the absence, of an objective fact hidden from plain sight, but the exercise of the same discretion, where an attacking phase begins, what contact counts as a foul, when a play warrants a second look — applied twice, in opposite directions, and presented both times in the language of technical certainty: “VAR reviewed and confirmed it,” in one case; “VAR found no reason to intervene,” in the other. That language is precisely what risks substituting the referee’s conscience with the system’s authority. And when a decision is announced as pure judgment, without the aid of that same measurement, right after having invoked it, minutes earlier, on an apparently similar play, that asymmetry also strips the referee of the moral responsibility every judgment carries, this time under the appearance of unfairness.
That technological phenomenon is not confined to VAR: it is amplified, further, by the same information technologies, television, social media, that broadcast every play to the entire world. What remained afterward was not the scoreline, but the character of everyone involved: the Egyptian Football Association said, in a statement, that a number of football experts and specialist analysts had “highlighted controversial and influential refereeing incidents,” and raised “profound questions about the consistency and fairness” of the decisions; Egypt’s coach, Hossam Hassan, told the Associated Press: “We have been treated unfairly today. We have suffered an injustice.” Neither reaction resolved the technical doubt over the play; both, instead, confirmed what I had already warned of months earlier regarding the curling incident at the Winter Games: what endures in collective memory is not the result, but the controversy.
We do not expect a human referee to be perfect. What areté demands here is not VAR’s infallibility, but the institutional honesty to acknowledge its limits: measuring with greater precision is not the same as judging with greater wisdom, and no video review, however exhaustive, can substitute for the conscience of whoever ultimately decides. The greater our technological dependence for the game’s external justice, the greater must be the internal demand, on referees, federations, and FIFA itself, to exercise that judgment with transparency and proportion.
This case suggests a recommendation, though not the one a first impulse might propose. A public log of every play VAR considered and dismissed does not seem like a practical solution: it would multiply refereeing bureaucracy in the very sport that, according to Gardner, owes much of its popularity to staying simple. A more practical, and simpler, alternative would be a precedent rule: once VAR has intervened during a match to review a given type of contact, the referee would be obligated to apply the same standard to a comparable play affecting the opposing team, even if their on-field impression is that it isn’t necessary. Today, Article 36.8 of the FIFA World Cup 26 regulations merely authorizes the use of VAR “per the protocol established by IFAB,” without requiring that consistency between both halves of the pitch. A precedent obligation, binary, with no logs or added bureaucracy, applied publicly and visibly: if it was reviewed there, it gets reviewed here, would be enough to close that gap, without adding a single layer of complexity to the game.
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As I argued in “Technology, Competition, and Fair Play” (Dribbli Ethosport, 2026), technology strengthens the execution of Fair Competition, it measures better, classifies faster, reduces perceptual error, but it does not replace conscience. What happened in the 58th minute of Argentina-Egypt is, perhaps, the clearest illustration of that warning so far in the 2026 World Cup.
FIFA WORLD CUP 2026 FAIR PLAY SERIES
Referencias / References
[i] Source: FIFA World Cup 2026 Match Centre. Other providers, such as ESPN and WhoScored, place Argentina’s possession higher, between 63% and 64%.
[ii] As reported by The Athletic.