World Cup 2026: Variations on a Theme
At the 2026 World Cup, football’s struggle is no longer only over goals, tactics and trophies. It is also about who gets to judge, who gets to represent, and whether human beings remain at the centre of systems built to serve them.
I have been obsessed with football for as long as I can remember. Before international tournaments, stadiums, national anthems and impossible goals, there was a plastic ball at my grandparents’ house. Family gatherings. Cousins. Furniture pushed aside. A makeshift pitch in the small front yard, formed out of whatever space the adults had not occupied, always careful of my grandmother’s plants around the edges.
Later came school football, and with it, a passion for leagues and tournaments. There were posters of Pelé, who was before my time, but whose shadow still loomed over the seventies, as it does today. I have followed every World Cup since 1978, obsessively, to the point of a near-total shutdown of my life during that extraordinary month of matches.
For one month every four years, I rearrange work, travel and life around the games. Brazil, Germany and Italy have always been my teams, but the World Cup is larger than team allegiance. It is one of the few global rituals left that can bring billions of people, from radically different cultures and political realities, into the same emotional space.
Football does not transcend politics. Nothing with this much money, nationalism, corruption and public attention can pretend to stand outside politics. But football can still produce a temporary common ground across borders. It can allow people who have nothing else in common to share suspense, disappointment, relief and joy for ninety minutes.
Being the workaholic that I am, I do not remember taking many conventional vacations in my adult life. But the World Cup has been something close to one: not an escape from the world, but a return to something essential in it, forgetting and remembering at the same time.
Football belongs among the signs of human civilization. When Voyager carried images, music and sounds from Earth into space, it carried a message about what we thought was worth preserving. Football should have been there too, not merely as a sport, but as a form of human intelligence: movement, instinct, calculation, courage, rhythm, failure, joy, cruelty and grace. A game of football would tell another civilization a great deal about humanity on Earth.
Football does not need goals to be alive. A scoreless match can be magnificent because the drama often happens elsewhere: a defender recognizing danger before it arrives; a midfielder seeing a pass nobody else has seen; a striker making a run only to create space for another player; a goalkeeper standing in anticipation while an entire stadium waits for failure.
Much of the game happens away from the ball. That is why I have never accepted the lazy claim that football is slow. It is not slow. It is layered. It is teamwork that celebrates individuality, but only insofar as that individuality finds meaning within a collective endeavour. The beauty of football lies in that tension between the individual act and the structure it serves.
Over the years, football has changed. Some changes have clearly improved it: better safety standards, better pitches, better conditioning, goal-line technology and more accurate offside decisions. These are corrections to blind spots. A ball has crossed the line or it has not. A player is offside or is not. Technology can help answer factual questions.
But facts are not the whole game. The question is where technology stops. Does it serve human beings in the task they are trying to accomplish, or does it begin to stand between them and the task itself? The 2026 World Cup has pushed that question further than before. Football now exists inside an expanding technological apparatus: AI-supported tracking, connected-ball sensors, semi-automated offside systems, referee-view cameras and increasingly detailed video review.
None of this is inherently a threat. The danger begins when technology stops clarifying the game and starts redefining it. FIFA and IFAB are clear about the official principle: VAR does not replace the referee. The referee remains the final decision-maker. Video review is meant to correct a clear and obvious error or a serious missed incident.
That is the theory. The experience on the pitch is less reassuring.
A referee repeatedly summoned into a world of freeze-frames, microscopic contact points and slowed-down collisions may technically remain in charge while becoming psychologically subordinate to the system. The screen tells the referee what matters. The system selects the angle. The replay isolates a fraction of a second that can turn a physical contest into a punishable offence.
Football is not merely a collection of measurable facts. It is a human encounter. It has force, balance, accident, deception, timing, fear and consequence. It has physicality. It has context. It is dramatic.
Technology should establish facts. Human beings must still judge acts.
That is not sentimentality. It is the difference between a game administered by people and a game processed by systems. A referee must be able to see the whole event, not merely its most suspicious fraction. A referee must judge whether a challenge was careless, reckless or excessive, or whether contact was simply part of football’s physical language.
The danger is not that referees will become more accurate. The danger is that they will become less capable of judgment because they have been trained to distrust their own capacity to read the game. An overreliance on technology is the slippery slope that concerns me.
Germany’s elimination by Paraguay offered a revealing example. In extra time, Jonathan Tah headed in what appeared to be a winning goal for Germany. After a VAR review, the referee ruled that Waldemar Anton had impeded Paraguay goalkeeper Orlando Gill. The goal was disallowed. Germany later lost on penalties.
Perhaps the referee was entitled to reach that conclusion. That is not the central issue. The question is whether VAR is still applying the threshold it claims to defend.
“Clear and obvious” should not become “technically arguable after several minutes of forensic examination.” A decision cannot rest only on a frozen frame. It must include what came before and after: motion, interaction and context.
Slow motion can make almost any physical encounter look suspicious. Freeze football at the wrong instant and it ceases to look like football. A crowded penalty area becomes a legal file. A contested corner becomes a crime scene. The body language of a player in motion is stripped of movement, resistance and reaction. Only contact remains.
Much like the meaning of a photograph that changes as it is enlarged, every frame of ultra-slow motion begins to alter the meaning it conveys. A single frame, selected from thousands that make up a sequence of events behind a play, is not the whole story that should determine a call. It may reveal something important. It may also distort the event by separating it from the force, movement and intention that gave it meaning in the first place.
This is not an argument for returning to obvious mistakes. Nor is it nostalgia for referees missing what everyone at home can see. Maradona’s “Hand of God” remains an argument for technology entering football.
Portugal’s match against Croatia showed the other side of the question. A VAR review led to a penalty after Nikola Vlašić brought down Renato Veiga. Cristiano Ronaldo converted. That was technology serving the game. It identified a material infringement and allowed the referee to correct it.
But the same match showed the opposite danger. Croatia’s late equaliser was ruled out after connected-ball technology detected what FIFA determined was a slight touch by Igor Matanović in the build-up, leaving Joško Gvardiol offside before the goal. The decision may have been technically correct. But technical correctness is not the end of the argument.
Technology can establish a fact with microscopic precision while leaving the larger question untouched: does that precision still serve the intelligibility, proportion and human rhythm of the game? Germany’s disallowed goal demonstrated VAR’s capacity to turn a marginal physical encounter into a decisive offence. Portugal’s penalty showed what the system can do when it clarifies a meaningful infringement. Croatia’s disallowed equaliser showed how a technically correct fact can still overwhelm the lived reality of a game.
A football referee does more than call fouls and offsides. The task is judgment. The goal is not perfection at any cost. It is proportion. It is keeping the human being between technology and the task at hand.
The same concern applies to FIFA’s compulsory hydration breaks. Player welfare matters. Heat is real. Dehydration is real. But stopping every World Cup match for three minutes at the same point in each half, regardless of temperature or conditions, is a blunt instrument. FIFA calls it a welfare measure. It may be one. But it also interrupts the internal rhythm of a sport built on pressure, flow and emotional accumulation. It drains the drama from the game.
A football match is not a sequence of content blocks. It is a living structure. A team is pinned back for eight minutes, then finds a way out. A crowd begins to believe. A goal is coming, or it is not. To stop the game mechanically at the same point in every match is to impose an administrative logic on a form that has always drawn its power from continuity.
The fact that such breaks also sit comfortably with commercial scheduling is not proof of motive. It is, however, reason enough to question the rule.
Football will survive this. It has survived worse: corruption, scandal, bad governance, cynical commercialization and endless attempts to make it more manageable than it is. But survival is not the standard. The point is to engage, communicate and keep pace with technological advancement without allowing it to suck the humanity out of what we do.
The issue is not whether football should use technology. The issue is whether technology serves the game, or whether the game increasingly serves the system built around it. Football remains beautiful because it is human. It contains error, interpretation and the possibility that a referee, a player or a crowd can still see more than a machine can measure.
That is not a reason to reject technology. It is a reason to keep human judgment in charge of it.
Football is only the small, pleasurable case. The larger question is whether we are building tools that extend human judgment, or systems that spare us the burden of exercising it.
Babak Payami
June 3, 2026