Add The Wire As Your Trusted Source
For the best experience, open
https://m.thewire.in
on your mobile browser.
AdvertisementAdvertisement
From VAR and AI offside lines to connected balls and live analytics, technology is increasingly transforming football at the cost of human spirit and emotion.
Argentina’s Thiago Almada, celebrates scoring his side’s first goal against Uruguay during a qualifying soccer match for the FIFA World Cup 2026 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Friday, March 21, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.
Advertisement
The 2026 FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cup ended in a fog of technical confusion. A decade ago, FIFA introduced technology to make football fairer. Today it behaves like an autocrat.
Once, no machine decided what happened on the field. Fouls, offsides, throw-ins, corners and penalties were judged instantly by referees and linesmen, their whistles and flags keeping the game’s rhythm.
Technology arrived to settle old controversies – Geoff Hurst’s disputed “Wembley Goal” in 1966, Maradona’s “Hand of God” in 1986, Frank Lampard’s disallowed “Ghost Goal” in 2010 and more. Ironically, that same technology now inflicts football’s deepest wounds.
At the latest world cup, confusing calls and delayed verdicts drained the joy from the spectators, as two knockout matches demonstrated.
In the Round of 16, VAR, the Video Assistant Referee, examined a challenge between Argentina’s Lisandro Martinez and Egypt’s Marwan Atiyah, flagged a foul that went undetected in the normal speed of the game and cancelled Egypt’s second goal.
In the England-Norway quarter-final, the ball brushed a spider-cam wire, but since its sensor showed no “spike,” VAR let England’s goal stand instead of a “dropped ball.”
Such confusion resurfaces as technology digs deeper into the game. FIFA’s ambition to build a data bank at each world cup and make the sport flawless has unsettled its character.
Football was never perfect and that imperfection made it the greatest game. Wrong penalties, disputed offsides and baffling calls fuelled arguments then, as it still does. Had VAR existed in 1986, Maradona’s “Hand of God” would never have become legend. Machines cannot grasp the artistry born of human error.
A game once governed by human judgment since the world cup’s early days, now runs on cameras, sensors and data.
A player’s ball control, speed, fatigue and injuries are now data points deciding player substitutions and match tactics. Today’s world cup is fought as much through engineering, analytics and AI as it is on grass.
Technology’s onslaught began with “goal-line technology” at the 2014 Brazil World Cup. Fourteen high-speed cameras tracked the ball and signalled the referee’s smartwatch within a second of it crossing the goal line.
Russia, in 2018, brought “VAR”, feeding footage from 33 cameras into a video room for slow-motion reviewing. Qatar, in 2022, added “semi-automated offside technology,” using twelve roof-mounted cameras to track 29 body points of every player, 50 times a second, to draw a digital offside line.
The 2026 tournament went even more hi-tech, with “connected ball technology” consisting of a 14-gram sensor inside the ball that sent speed, direction and touch data 500 times a second. Alongside these, the tournament introduced digital player avatars, referees’ ear-mounted cameras and advanced analytics.
The limits of technological precision
Wherever there is technology, flaws follow. One aberration is the camera’s video frame-rate limit.
Fouls or offside within the two-millisecond blind spot between two video frames can go unrecorded. That gap, the computer assumes and fills. This transforms scientific certainty into ambiguity, because an ordinary touch in real time can look like a violent foul in slow motion.
Semi-automated offside has its own problems. The coloured line on broadcast screens is only an algorithm’s estimate. Cameras scan a player’s body outline while AI guesses where an elbow or foot stands to build a “digital avatar.” Therefore, the line may not precisely depict where a player stood.
A study by scientist Pooya Soltani at the University of Bath in England found that spectators see the actual moment a ball is kicked roughly 0.13 seconds after it happens – triall for a player to change position and render an offside call wrong
Every world cup has exposed such cracks. In 2014, at its first use, goal-line technology flashed “no goal,” then “goal,” in the France-Honduras match.
In the 2018 final, Croatia’s Ivan Perisic conceded a penalty after an unintentional handball was caught only in slow-motion review.
At Qatar 2022, in the Japan-Spain match, a ball that appeared to have gone out of field was ruled to have stayed because a sliver remained above the sideline, while in the same tournament, the AI offside line wrongly flagged Lautaro Martinez, scrapping a legitimate Argentina goal against Saudi Arabia.
Football runs on split-second decisions and spontaneous movement. It cannot be measured, only felt. Yet technology’s surveillance now falls on that human feeling.
Impact on referees
On-field referees are losing their freedom as well. Under VAR’s constant instruction, they trust their own calls less and wait for a VAR signal, upsetting the game’s tactical balance.
VAR’s long reviews disrupt players’ rhythm too.
Even fans miss out as their unrestrained exuberance at a goal turns mute, with their eyes anxiously fixated on the screen.
The problem is not only confined to the world cup. Europe’s biggest leagues like the La Liga, English Premier League and tournaments like the EURO, have seen VAR spark controversy over late calls, cancelled goals and missed line decisions.
Reactions are mixed. Croatia captain Luka Modric has criticised VAR’s inconsistency, while Netherlands captain Virgil van Dijk has voiced frustration at its long reviews.
Pierluigi Collina, FIFA’s referees committee chairman, maintains that technology exists to assist referees, not replace them.
Egypt’s football association complained to FIFA over the Argentina match, citing the cancelled goal and rejected penalty appeal.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino, though, claims technology has lifted world cup transparency from 93 to 99% – a figure the field doesn’t support.
When technology creates a new security risk
The risk isn’t confined to the game either. The same network that made refereeing dependent on technology has exposed football to hacking.
In 2017, Russia’s “Fancy Bears” hacked FIFA’s systems and leaked doping data from the 2010 world cup. During Qatar 2022, a group called “Blacktech” breached Qatar’s broadcast telecom operator, although it did not tamper with the live feed.
Ahead of this World Cup, a researcher known as “bobdahacker” found a flaw in FIFA’s agent portal where anyone registering with ordinary identification could reach FIFA’s cloud infrastructure, including broadcast dashboards and doctor live match data – a flaw that FIFA later fixed.
The fear remains that something worse could happen. The ball’s sensor, referees’ audio channel and live analytics servers sit on one domain. A skilled hacker breaching it could, through signal jamming or data manipulation, alter a match result and the billions riding on it in bets. A century of credibility built by the sport’s biggest event could crumble instantly.
The need for human judgment
Football is not a precise geometric measurement or a mathematical equation. It is the pulse of human emotion, unpredictable error and unscripted drama.
Science ought to complement football, not govern it. An answer may lie in using technology sparingly, only for major, unmistakable errors, while keeping on-field referees the primary decision-makers and the game’s flow the top priority.
If, in its pursuit of perfection, technology swallows the heart of football, the game will no longer be what Pelé called “o jogo bonito,” – the beautiful game.
Spectators do not watch football for mechanical precision. They love to witness an epic of human error, speed, heroism and emotion. Unless technology is reined in, football will lose its magic.
Future world cups may turn out flawless, but lifeless at the same time.
Kaushik Bhowmik is a senior information security analyst with HSBC and has written op-eds on science and geopolitics in Indian and international publications.
This article went live on September fifth, two thousand twenty six, at thirty-eight minutes past seven in the evening.
The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channelfor sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
