Kelly Rodman 2026

A friend’s breakdown of the Croatia-Portugal VAR decision is worth reading, and I agree with it in full. If this pattern continues, it reinforces a growing perception that success at the top level of football is shaped less by merit than by money and influence. @FIFAcom does not appear sufficiently committed to transparency or fairness in how these decisions are made and reviewed. At the highest level, outcomes are often decided by the smallest of margins — which is why officiating in these moments matters so much. The officials in this match made a call that ended @HNS_CFF’s run, and the reasoning behind it does not hold up to scrutiny. The Croatia Call Might Be the Worst in Sports History I’ve had a full day to sit with the Croatia call. I’ve watched the replays, gone through the rules, and measured it against the worst officiating disasters in sports. My conclusion: that disallowed goal may be the worst call ever made. Not the most famous. Not the most argued-about. The worst. Here’s why it differs from the usual suspects. It isn’t Maradona’s Hand of God, where a referee missed a handball in real time, before video review existed. It isn’t Jim Joyce robbing Galarraga of a perfect game — brutal, but a split-second human error. It isn’t the Saints-Rams no-call, where everyone watching knew a flag belonged on the field. It isn’t Don Denkinger in the ’85 World Series. Those were humans missing something fast and hard to see. This was the opposite. The call on the field was a goal. Croatia had equalized in the final minutes, 2-2, headed for extra time. Then VAR stepped in — and instead of clean visual proof of a touch, instead of the ball’s path or spin actually changing, officials leaned on a faint “blip” from the chip inside the ball. That was the entire basis for reversal. Watch it back. The trajectory doesn’t shift. The spin doesn’t shift. It sails past the defender’s head with no visible contact. Yet that blip was enough to rule a touch, which made the next Croatian player offside, which erased the goal, which ended Croatia’s tournament. It gets worse. Even granting the faintest touch, that shouldn’t have ended the analysis. Under offside law, a defender who deliberately plays the ball can reset the offside phase. So the real question wasn’t just “did he touch it?” — it was “did the Portuguese defender deliberately play it afterward?” If he moved toward it, attacked it, got a genuine piece of it before the attacker entered the play, there’s a real case the phase should’ve reset. A stray deflection doesn’t reset offside. A deliberate play does. VAR needed to examine that too, not stop at a sensor reading and call it settled. So the failure stacked in layers: a correct goal on the field, an alleged touch the video doesn’t clearly support, a sensor blip treated as proof, and a deliberate-play question never addressed — wiping out a stoppage-time equalizer. This is what makes it worse than an ordinary blown call. VAR exists so referees don’t have to live with missing something huge in real time, with bad angles and bodies flying everywhere. That’s forgivable. But here, the on-field call was right. Review had every advantage — multiple angles, unlimited time, total control — and still overturned a goal on a sensor reading the footage doesn’t back up. A different category of failure entirely. In a knockout game. On a goal that would’ve forced extra time. When the standard for overturning a call should be sky-high. If the video doesn’t clearly show the touch, and the ball doesn’t react like it was touched, how do you erase a country’s World Cup on a sensor blip? And even allowing the faintest contact, how do you not fully examine whether the deliberate play should have reset offside? VAR isn’t supposed to manufacture microscopic, unverifiable infractions. It shouldn’t take a goal off unless the error is unmistakable. This wasn’t unmistakable. It wasn’t obvious. And it changed everything.