A Player's Butt Ended a World Cup Dream. FIFA Thinks This Is Fine.

A Quick History of How We Got to Offside Butts

To understand why fans are losing their minds, you have to go back to where VAR came from and why people wanted it in the first place. The origin story, as NPR traces it, involves Thierry Henry and one of the most brazen handballs in soccer history during the 2009 World Cup qualifiers. France vs. Ireland. Henry touched the ball with his hand, assisted the winning goal, and the referee saw nothing. Ireland was knocked out of the tournament on a call that anybody with a television could see was wrong.

That kind of robbery is what VAR was designed to prevent. FIFA, famously resistant to change, slowly came around. They tested the system in Major League Soccer games in 2014 and 2015, because according to Professor Chris Davis at Adelphi University, American fans tend to be quicker to embrace technology and less precious about soccer tradition. VAR officially debuted at the 2018 World Cup. People liked it. Clear errors were being fixed. The integrity of the game was being protected. It was, briefly, a good thing.

Then They Started Using It for Everything

The 2026 World Cup is a different animal entirely. According to NPR, referees are now reviewing VAR constantly, on everything from penalty area fouls to offside calls, and the results have been absurd. We're talking about goals being annulled because a player's toe crossed an invisible line when the ball was struck. We're talking about the Iranian butt call. We are talking about a Colombian goal that got wiped out over a toe. A. Toe.

Here's some helpful context on offside: NPR reports the rule is over 150 years old, has 45 clauses, and runs roughly a thousand words. It is, to put it charitably, complicated. It was designed to stop players from camping out near the opponent's goal to grab easy scores. It was not designed, one assumes, to create a framework under which a human buttock becomes the deciding factor in a World Cup match. And yet. Here we are.

Felipe Cardenas, a senior writer with The Athletic, put it plainly to NPR: "It is completely interrupting what the game state is." He's right. One of the things that makes soccer electric is the goal celebration, that eruption of pure emotion from players and fans at the same moment. VAR has turned that into a held breath. You score, you celebrate, you wait, and then you find out whether your joy was real or a false alarm.

The Egypt-Argentina Game That Broke Everyone's Brain

If you want the single clearest example of what happens when VAR goes sideways, NPR has you covered with the Egypt vs. Argentina match. For most of the game, Egypt dominated. They scored in the 67th minute. Then VAR flagged a foul in the lead-up to the goal. Not a foul near the goal. A foul across the field, in the build-up play. The referee reviewed it, agreed, and wiped out the goal. Argentina won.

Egypt came out of that tournament saying they were robbed. Whether they were or they weren't, the fact that a goal can be nullified over contact that happened far away from the action, on the basis of a video review that takes long enough to kill the atmosphere in the stadium, is the whole problem in miniature. The technology is not wrong exactly. The question is whether using it this aggressively, this often, for calls this marginal, is actually making the game better. The answer from the stands seems to be a pretty loud no.

FIFA's Position: Trust the Process, Ignore the Fans

FIFA's official stance, per NPR, is that VAR is making the game fairer. And there is a version of that argument that holds water. The alternative, as the Thierry Henry game illustrated, is a system where a referee's bad eyesight or bad angle can knock a country out of the World Cup on a visible cheat. Nobody wants that back.

But "fairer" and "better" are not automatically the same thing. A game can be technically more accurate in its refereeing and simultaneously less exciting, less human, and less worth watching. FIFA has a history of treating rules as sacred objects rather than as tools designed to serve the sport. The offside rule has 45 clauses and a thousand words because it has been amended and argued over for more than a century, and the idea that modern camera technology can now determine exactly which square inch of a player's body was marginally past which line at a given millisecond is... fine, maybe, in theory. In practice it produces butt calls and toe calls and a stadium full of people who have no idea whether to cheer.