I inherited a few things from my father, who, as the story goes, when I was a baby in Transylvania, swam across a frozen river to escape communist Romania, toward a faith that we could forge our own brave futures, free from ethnic oppression. I inherited his unruly curls, refusing control and predictability. I inherited his sometimes comic rage at injustice. I inherited his love of the beautiful game, its history, its ever-evolving, complex entanglements with state and power. His faith that people who have little can stand proudly against nations who have stolen their wealth, and refuse to back down.

He is no longer here for me to talk to about the World Cup. And this impossible and forever grief has been opened fresh as I try to imagine what he would say about what we have watched unfold in the 2026 games. There is a chip inside the ball now. It hums at 500 times a second, registering contacts no eye can see, no crowd can feel, no player can dispute. It enters the conversation as an indisputable, objective data point, asserting authority over anyone and everyone. On the third of July, in Toronto, that sensor ended Croatia's World Cup. Joško Gvardiol had bundled home what looked like an equalizer 13 minutes into stoppage time, and for a few delirious seconds the stadium believed. Then according to officials the sensor detected the smallest brush of a teammate's hair against the ball, on its way to the man who set up the goal. FIFA officials decided it was enough to call it offside. The goal was erased. Portugal advanced, 2-1. A machine had registered what no human present could, and in registering it, unmade a moment of collective joy.

FIFA insists the call was correct. Perhaps it was. I can’t say, the beautiful game is rife with instances when fans felt distraught by calls refs have made. But I can say that this is different. We have built a tournament where correctness is now adjudicated by inertial sensors and video rooms and it lies beyond dispute. Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan chronicler of the game, warned us. "The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail," he wrote, "the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable." The chip in the ball is the technocrat's dream: a game with the unforeseeable engineered out. It is not just that the game has been made less human under the guise of objectivity. It is that the fantasy of objectivity itself has become the cudgel.

Objectivity as Disguise

Here is what I am reflecting on, wishing I could discuss with my dad, at the close of this tournament: The promise of VAR was never really neutrality. It was the appearance of neutrality, which is a different and more useful thing if you happen to hold power. The appearance of objectivity is not a side effect of the manipulation; instead, it is the mechanism, because a decision the machine is presumed to have made is a decision no one thinks to question. A goal-line sensor cannot be bribed. But the humans who decide when to consult it, what angle to review, which foul to freeze and which to wave through, can be, and the data increasingly suggests they have been, whether by conscious design or the gravitational pull of a superstar's fame and the money this can make for FIFA.

This World Cup has gifted us many lessons and reminders, one of them is that supposed objectivity is not the same thing as fairness.

Similarly, there are echoes of this pattern in Egypt against Argentina in the round of 16. Egypt led early. Mostafa Ziko put the ball in the net for what would have been a two-goal cushion, and VAR chalked it off for the faintest infraction in the buildup. Late in the match, with Egypt still level, a shove in the box went unpunished by the same system that had been so exacting minutes before. Argentina scored in the 90-second minute and advanced, 3-2. Egypt's football association filed a formal complaint. Their coach made clear the issue when he said his team had suffered an injustice, and suggested that FIFA needed Lionel Messi to keep playing. Analysts who reviewed the tournament's VAR data found that Argentina and Mexico received the most favorable review outcomes of any teams at the tournament, while Croatia and Iran received the least. From this data it appears that a system built to remove human judgment from the game continues to produce outcomes that track, with uncomfortable fidelity, who those in power most need to keep around to increase earnings.

The instances telling this story are culminating into a chorus. In an Iran-Belgium match, a goal was disallowed because VAR determined that an Iranian player's rear end, not his foot, not his knee, but the curve of his backside, had drifted a fraction past the last defender. It was, on its face, absurd, and it was also revealing, because it showed the machine doing exactly what it was built to do: finding a violation so microscopic that no stadium, no broadcast, no human referee running at full speed could ever have called it in real time, and then presenting that finding as more true, more final, than what 40,000 people had just watched with their own eyes. Such instances, of which there are others, are leading fans and experts alike to ask whether VAR had gone too far. In this variation, football survived for 150 years on the premise that referees would sometimes be wrong, and that this was a condition of the game being played by humans, for humans, at human speed. It appears that under the guise of taking away the possibility of human error to allocate the decision to VAR, we are simply relocating the injustice somewhere less visible and giving it a machine's alibi.

This World Cup has gifted us many lessons and reminders, one of them is that supposed objectivity is not the same thing as fairness, and a system that claims the first while abandoning the second is more dangerous than one that never claimed either, because it forecloses the argument. You cannot appeal to a sensor's conscience. What we need, and what this World Cup has made painfully clear we are losing, is the return of human judgment, fallible and accountable and answerable to a crowd, back into the center of the game. And this goes for on the pitch and off the pitch.

Breaking the Rhythm to Cash In

If you want to understand who the 2026 World Cup is really for, watch what happens 22 minutes into each half. The rhythm is interrupted, and the play stops. Not because it is dangerously hot, though with climate change it too often is; the breaks run on schedule even in roofed, air-conditioned stadiums. They stop because FIFA decreed a mandatory three-minute "hydration break" in all 104 matches, "regardless of heat conditions." It is the first World Cup in history to do so. Officially, the line is that this is about player welfare, but if we follow the money a different story emerges.

Soccer, alone among the major North American television products, historically offered almost no in-game commercial inventory. Ninety minutes, two halves, no timeouts to sell. The mandatory breaks changed that overnight, manufacturing 208 guaranteed advertising windows across the tournament and restructuring the game into four quarters, conveniently familiar to the American fan and the American businesses FIFA is courting. Media buyers estimate Fox Sports alone stands to reap a minimum of $250 million from these breaks, with plausible figures running to half a billion. Former England defender Gary Neville called it what it is: a "stealth advertising break."

Heat is real, and climate change is making it deadlier. Here, a genuine safety concern has been laundered into a revenue engine, and the game's rhythm, its uninterrupted, breath-held flow, the very thing that distinguishes it, has been sold for the price of a commercial slot. Once you see that the game's own rhythm is for sale, the question is no longer whether other decisions are being bent, only which ones, and in whose favor.

And yet, capitalism did not manage to buy everything. Not everyone in this tournament was for sale, and not everyone who showed up did so for the sponsors.

Algeria, making the trip to the American Midwest, chose the college town of Lawrence, Kansas as their base. And Lawrence welcomed them with open arms. The University of Kansas marching band learned and played the Algerian national anthem. A local artist built a massive Algerian flag out of organic materials. No hydration break manufactured that. It happened because people decided, without being asked and without being paid, to open a door.

That reminder of who we are is also a gift we received from this World Cup alongside everything else this tournament has shown us about who is trying to own the game. There may be polarizing narratives that cultivate a sense of suspicion about people who do not think like us or look like us, but the world is filled with people who look at the visitor and welcome them with a song that reminds them of home.

The Trump Card (vs. the Red Card)

Oh and perhaps the least surprising of all the events from this World Cup was the phone call. Folarin Balogun, the United States' top scorer, a Black, American-born son of Nigerian immigrants, playing for a nation whose president has spent the year trying to end birthright citizenship, was sent off against Bosnia on a red card, triggering an automatic one-match ban that FIFA had repeatedly described as beyond appeal. Days later, that unappealable ban vanished. FIFA invoked a probationary loophole to suspend the suspension, clearing Balogun to face Belgium in Seattle less than 24 hours after the decision. It was the first time since 1962 that a red card issued at a World Cup did not result in a suspension.

Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to ask for a review. He then thanked FIFA publicly for "reversing a great injustice." Belgium's football association said it was "astonished," and UEFA called the reversal "unprecedented, incomprehensible, and unjustifiable." Speaking from the White House, Trump said he hadn't known what a red card was until this happened; once he found out, he said, "You got to be kidding," and picked up the phone.

Trump may think he can do anything in this world, but the consequences are ours to carry and ours to refuse.

Infantino had handed Trump the inaugural "FIFA Peace Prize" the year before, an award invented, it is hard not to conclude, to flatter a notoriously fragile ego. And a supposedly ironclad suspension dissolved within days of a presidential request, reshaping how an opponent could prepare for a knockout match. When the game's........

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