Mohamed Salah had every reason to think he’d won it. Ninety minutes of a career-defining performance, Egypt two goals up on the reigning world champions, and now the ball at his feet with only Julian Alvarez between him and a penalty that could have sent Argentina — and Lionel Messi — home from the 2026 World Cup.
He went down. The referee waved play on. Argentina broke the other way, and moments later Enzo Fernandez’s header completed one of the finest comebacks in the FIFA World Cup history.
By the time the whistle blew, Egypt’s coach Hossam Hassan was calling it an injustice, arguing his side had been “treated unfairly.”
The Egyptian Football Association lodged a formal complaint with FIFA, demanding an investigation into “double standards.”
Mostafa Zico, who had a goal disallowed earlier in the match, went further.
“It is clear that this tournament has been fixed.”
But most independent review panels concluded the officials got it right, or at least defensibly so.
The disallowed goal followed the letter of the law. The non-penalty for Salah was, in the eyes of several match analysts, a case of an attacker looking for contact rather than a clear foul.
This is not to say Egypt were robbed. The point is that two sets of reasonable people can watch the same incident and reach different conclusions — and the rules were built, on purpose, to allow exactly that.
The Video Assistant Referee (VAR) technology is not short on cameras. The tools to settle almost any contact dispute exist and are sitting right there in the broadcast truck.
What VAR does not have, by design, is a fixed bar for what counts as a foul. The instruction to officials is to intervene only for a “clear and obvious error”.
That phrase is a deliberate policy choice by the game’s rule-making body, International Football Association Board (IFAB), to keep interpretation — and therefore inconsistency — inside the system.
But even that threshold is not fixed. For this World Cup, FIFA referees’ chief Pierluigi Collina introduced four new areas where the VAR could intervene, deliberately expanding the technology’s reach. The goalposts are moving.
Collina defended the Egypt decision.
“There is no defined limit regarding either the distance from goal or the amount of time between the incident and the goal,” he wrote. “We believe that a foul is a foul. Regardless of whether the foul appears ‘obvious,’ if the referee did not see it on the field of play, the VAR can intervene.”
The same replay that shows one shirt-pull can be waved away as innocuous contact and another can be given as a stonewall penalty and both rulings can be defended as correct under the current wording.
Egypt’s grievance was never really about missing footage. It was about the fact that the rule allows two reasonable people to watch the identical clip and land in different places — and the sport is fine with that.
Luka Modric, whose 24-year World Cup career ended in a 2-1 defeat to Portugal, put it bluntly.
“For some things it’s useful, but it’s either being used incorrectly or selectively, depending on the size of the team or whatever else,” he said. “If it’s a 200 per cent mistake, then you intervene. If it’s not, if it’s in a grey area, then there’s no reason to get involved.”
A grey area. Exactly.
FLOW WHEN IT SUITS
The stated goal of the “clear and obvious” threshold is to stop the technology from re-litigating every marginal decision, preserving both the referee’s authority and the flow of the game.
The trade-off IFAB has accepted is that a small number of close calls will be read differently by different officials.
Except the same governing body doesn’t actually treat that “flow” as sacred when something else is on the table.
This World Cup introduced, for the first time, a mandatory three-minute hydration break in every half of every one of the 104 matches — not just when heat thresholds are crossed, but on a fixed clock regardless of temperature, roof, or kick-off time.
FIFA official Manolo Zubiria was explicit: three minutes, whistle to whistle, every game, no exceptions.
The breaks have been widely criticised for killing momentum.
“They add nothing and take away a lot,” Uruguay coach Marcelo Bielsa said. Didier Deschamps, the France coach, acknowledged bluntly.
“It’s not two-half times, it is four-quarter times.”
Roy Keane called them “a timeout,” arguing that “we love football because of the pace of the game... what it’s doing is stopping the flow”.
Broadcasters have used the pauses to show commercials, with Fox in the United States going straight to ads.
Virgil van Dijk, the Netherlands captain, said it felt like they were “playing not to get injured” and that “maybe they shouldn’t try to Americanise the game and make it a commercial thing.”
Experts told the BBC that hydration break advertising could generate more than $250 million in revenue.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino denied that money had anything to do with it, insisting the policy was purely about “equal conditions” for all teams.
Maybe so. But an organisation that can insert a guaranteed, weather-independent stoppage into every single match isn’t one that treats “protecting the flow of the game” as an inviolable principle.
It’s one that protects the flow selectively — fast when a marginal foul call is on the line, negotiable when there’s a fixed commercial window to fill.
COST OF AMBIGUITY
So, the honest answer to “why doesn’t sport just fix this” isn’t that nobody has thought about it. It’s that a fully objective system is a myth even the people running these sports don’t fully believe in — and the hydration break is the tell.
If flow really were untouchable, there’d be no fixed break. If accuracy really were the priority above all else, the VAR threshold would be tighter.
Instead, football has quietly decided which kind of certainty it wants to sell to which audience and Salah’s disallowed penalty appeal and Egypt’s early exit sat on the wrong side of that ledger.
Egypt didn’t lose to a glitch. They lost, in part, to a rule that was built to allow exactly the outcome it produced — and sport has decided, mostly out loud, that this is a cost worth paying, right up until a fixed three-minute pause and a broadcast deal say otherwise.
Published in Dawn, July 12th, 2026