Kotaku73%
VAR Will Never Recover From Egypt Vs. Argentina At The World Cup 2026 72%
By Ethan Gach65%
7/7/2026, 12:40:53 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Framing Effect, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 68.4% saturation with 349 hits. Analysis detected 1,953 faulty-reasoning hits from 510 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 64.1% and a BS Rank of 72% (6,287 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 71.30% of the article peer group.
I’m a long-time defender of VAR, and even I never want to see another referee reviewing footage during the middle of a soccer game like they’re about to solve a murder.
You’re going to be hearing variations of that a lot going forward, I bet.
An obsession with the letter of the law is ruining the spirit of the game, something critics of the technology have said all along.
Anyone who watched Egypt lose to Argentina in Atlanta today will have a hard time not seeing their point.
Lionel Messi’s White and Sky Blues were already down a goal when Egypt made a courageous run down the field through multiple opposing Argentine players to string together an epic second goal.
Mohamed Salah marshalled the ball across to Mostafa Ziko for a clean finish that conjured precisely the type of moment everyone tuning into a World Cup game is hoping to witness.
There was just one problem: a borderline foul at the other end of the field back before the play started.
In came VAR to demand French referee François Letexier adjudicate the soft infraction that could not have felt more divorced from the magic everyone had just witnessed.
Egyptian midfielder Marwan Attia ended up being penalized for a light step on opponent Lisandro Martínez’s foot just prior to the buildup, stripping Egypt of its initial second goal against Argentina.
Though the Pharaohs eventually scored again anyway, they ended up losing the game 3-2 in an equally dramatic comeback by Messi’s men.
Instead of correcting a mistake, VAR hung like a corrupt shadow over the rest of an otherwise incredible match.
I’ve never seen fans so united in their abject hatred of it.
Some will point to an inconsistency with how the game was refereed, with certain fouls getting VAR review while others did not.
Others will argue this is less an issue with VAR as a tool than how it was applied in this particular instance.
I am not a paid commentator or professional player, and I have no personal stake in this debate other than that I want to watch soccer that is cool, exciting, and fun.
I want to be shocked by incredible plays, not by the gestures a ref makes when those plays are later undone.
Where many other professional sports keep time and manage clocks like corporate bean counters, soccer has eschewed the siren call of perfectly timed matches in favor of maintaining the flow and pace of the game.
It’s messy, it’s subjective, and it’s way more engaging than the last two minutes of an NFL or NBA game, where time dilates and commercial breaks proliferate.
VAR has always been a threat to that, but it’s increasingly a threat to the cool moments that are supposed to etch themselves into fans’ memories for years to come.
I’d rather contend with the arbitrary injustice of human error than watch those same mistakes derail the reason people delight in watching in the first place.
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