There’s a world cup going on right now, and we’ll soon have our new old world football champion. I watched many of the games in the group stage of the finals. Some were fantastic. Some weren’t, which is fine.

However, just like previous editions of the World Cup, once the elimination stage started, it quickly became evident that the problems that drove me out of watching these a few decades ago have not been resolved and we got our fresh new set of problems.

Here’s my subjective top pain points. I don’t know if these were real problems or pure disappointment because teams I liked lost. Maybe it was alright.

1. Football is a game where the referees can influence the result significantly. And did they use every opportunity to become part of the game. Many critical games had penalties, cancelled goals, red cards and what not. The ideal number of referee intervention impacting the game for me would be close of 0 goals/game, which is not what we observed under the current rules. Some games were entirely dominated by referees and their VAR system.
2. The World Cup had a new format with 48 teams reaching finals. Only 16 of these were from Europe. The absence of teams like Italy was quite noticeable. Pretty sure the Italians would’ve smashed out any non-European qualifier, except maybe Argentina and Brazil, if given a chance. So, rather than letting the strongest teams play, the rules were made in a way that it was guaranteed that potential World Cup medalists would eliminate each other before reaching the 2026 finals.
3. The longer format with weaker teams guaranteed more goals scored. First 3-4 rounds felt like a scoring safari for Messi, Haaland, Mbappe, and Kane, obliterating competition weaker than what we’ve seen in the recent decades. It felt like the entire format was designed to make these stars shine in the way WWE works.

It is possible that the observed bias in referee judgements has a logical explanation or it was just random. Such things can happen far more often than people would assume. VAR is supposedly over 98% accurate, despite most calls being purely subjective referee decisions but referees are also supposed to be about 95% accurate.

Let’s assume 100% accuracy and 10 important calls (counting free kicks, yellow cards and such) by the referees each game. Let’s assume that it was 50/50 for each situation that team A or team B was responsible. According to ChatGPT’s calculations, there’s 11% chance that what we observe referees favoring one of the teams without ever making a mistake. Out of 104 games, that’d be 11-12 games that felt ruined.

I didn’t manually verify if the AI’s calculations are correct but these numbers are about what I expected to see.

While it is entirely possible that the referees didn’t necessarily favor Argentina every game and randomness being a plausible explanation, to an outside observer the whole thing didn’t sit well and some people even renamed Argentina Vargentina.

So, I skipped the semi-finals and will likely skip the finals. I hope the winner of the World Cup is not a result of penalties, undone goals, and red cards. May the better team wins.