# FIFA World Cup 2026 - discussion etc **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Tags:** football-soccer-fifa\ **Created:** [October 14, 2025, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962 "2025-10-14T15:43:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 182
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3621 "2026-07-07T22:47:38Z")
Field goal ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3622 "2026-07-07T22:47:55Z")
Oof, leaned away on the strike. Temporary souvenir. ---
**Author:** ![Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiendish_astronaut/32/3295_2.png) [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiendish_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3623 "2026-07-07T22:48:24Z")
These penalties are dreadful ---
**Author:** ![rocking\_chair](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rocking_chair/32/2918_2.png) [@rocking\_chair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rocking_chair)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3624 "2026-07-07T22:48:29Z")
Save for Swiss! In for Swiss. In for Colombia! All up to Swiss. ---
**Author:** ![Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiendish_astronaut/32/3295_2.png) [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiendish_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3625 "2026-07-07T22:51:10Z")
Oh god another 90 minutes of watching Switzerland… ---
**Author:** ![rocking\_chair](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rocking_chair/32/2918_2.png) [@rocking\_chair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rocking_chair)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3626 "2026-07-07T22:51:34Z")
Swiss are though! ---
**Author:** ![SunUp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea5d25/32.png) [@SunUp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SunUp)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3627 "2026-07-07T22:51:51Z")
After an all-Vargas final PK showdown, Switzerland to face Argentina. ---
**Author:** ![Frodo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frodo/32/302_2.png) [@Frodo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frodo)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3628 "2026-07-07T22:52:59Z")
Fuck, we are, again, the last South American team standing, and we haven’t been particuarily brilliant. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3629 "2026-07-07T22:53:56Z")
So you did not peak too early. Clever! ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3630 "2026-07-07T22:56:21Z")
> [@Frodo](#): > > Fuck, we are, again, the last South American team standing, and we haven’t been particularly brilliant. Whatever South American illness was going around they caught it from North America. Hitting the upper bar was a very near miss. It struck the bar with real force. The air ball into the stands was painful to watch. ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3631 "2026-07-07T22:59:05Z")
I’m doing something with my sister on Thursday. I hope I can, at least, catch part of the second half. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3632 "2026-07-07T23:00:56Z")
If it was Colombia, I thought Argentina would go home, but now I think they’ll advance. Morocco vs Spain and England vs Argentina would be amazing semis. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3633 "2026-07-07T23:29:25Z")
No games tomorrow, right? ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3634 "2026-07-07T23:31:49Z")
Correct. Thursday afternoon is the next game. ---
**Author:** ![Frodo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frodo/32/302_2.png) [@Frodo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frodo)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3635 "2026-07-07T23:35:06Z")
I have a friend who gets married tomorrow, he wisely chose a day where there would be no World Cup games. ---
**Author:** ![duality72](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duality72/32/3910_2.png) [@duality72](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/duality72)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3636 "2026-07-07T23:48:26Z")
I asked Claude about VAR and the perception of how call quality has changed (or not). I thought it was interesting enough reading so I’ll post it here, but hidden for those who don’t want to read AI content. > **VAR and call quality perception** > > Yes — your observation is actually a composite of several named phenomena, and it’s a genuinely well-studied space. There isn’t one single term that captures the whole thing, but here are the pieces: > > **Prevalence-induced concept change** is probably the closest single match. This is from Levari et al.'s 2018 _Science_ paper (“Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment”): when instances of a problem become rarer, people expand their definition of the problem to include cases they previously would have ignored. Their famous example was showing people blue and purple dots — as blue dots became rare, participants started classifying purple dots as blue. Applied to VAR: as truly egregious refereeing errors get corrected, the threshold for what counts as a “controversy” drops, so marginal offsides and debatable handballs now occupy the outrage slot that ghost goals used to. The controversy count stays constant even as objective error rates fall, because “controversy” is a relative concept that recalibrates to the new baseline. > > **Algorithm aversion** is the second piece — Dietvorst, Simmons, and Massey’s 2015 work showing that people abandon trust in algorithms after seeing them err, even when the algorithm outperforms humans overall. A human referee missing a call is “part of the game”; a multi-million-dollar review system getting it wrong feels like a betrayal of its entire premise. The errors are judged against a perfection standard the technology implicitly promised, not against the human baseline it replaced. There’s a related finding (Dietvorst & Bharti, 2020) that people reject algorithms specifically in uncertain, judgment-heavy domains — which is exactly what subjective calls like handball and “clear and obvious” red cards are. > > **The Tocqueville paradox** (or “revolution of rising expectations”) covers the expectation-shift dynamic: as conditions improve, grievances intensify rather than diminish because expectations rise faster than reality. VAR raised the expected accuracy ceiling, so residual errors feel _worse_ than the same errors did pre-VAR. > > There’s also a **procedural justice** angle from the organizational fairness literature: people’s sense of fairness depends heavily on process legitimacy, not just outcome accuracy. VAR decisions that take four minutes, happen off-screen, and involve invisible deliberation feel less legitimate than an instant human call — even when they’re more correct. > > And the sports-specific literature backs your intuition directly. Research on VAR consistently finds evidence that the technology is very accurate, which would provide fairness to the game, yet its use remains controversial, with coaches displaying mixed opinions. One study of fan reactions at the 2018 World Cup explicitly framed this as VAR’s paradoxical nature — technologies introduced in the name of a “fairer game” that intensify and produce a range of unintended consequences. Work on players’ experiences found something similar to your point about improper use: while technology is commonly perceived to enhance accuracy and fairness in officiating, its misuse has given rise to feelings of conspiracy and distrust, with perceived game-to-game inconsistency undermining the sense of fairness. And a recent EPL analysis notes that VAR may affect not only the correction of clear errors but the broader ecology of refereeing — shifting thresholds for sanctioning and perceptions of fairness, which is your “new controversies created by the tool itself” mechanism. [PubMed Central + 3](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10681297/) > > One more subtlety worth adding to your model: VAR doesn’t just fail to reduce controversy — it _manufactures new categories_ of it that couldn’t exist before (millimeter offsides, “why didn’t they check the monitor,” re-refereeing on slow motion). Slow-motion replay itself is known to make contact look more deliberate and violent than it appears at full speed, which creates disputes about incidents nobody would have argued about live. So the controversy supply is partially conserved (concept change), partially transferred (from missed calls to process complaints), and partially net-new. > > If you want to read one thing, the Levari paper is the cleanest articulation of the core mechanism you described, and Tamir & Bar-Eli have written specifically on VAR and fairness perception in football. ---
**Author:** ![iamatractorboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iamatractorboy/32/21261_2.png) [@iamatractorboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamatractorboy)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2026, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3637 "2026-07-08T05:29:07Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#): > > Not good: I’ll just say it: it’s a largely tourist fan base I am going to assume that this is partly down to the astronomical ticket prices. People have treated this as a holiday experience rather than a football match. Apparently we are seeing this more and more at the bigger clubs in the Premier League in England - day trippers with lots of disposable income, who are more attractive to the clubs because they spend more on shirts and other merchandise and will put up with higher seat prices. Dare I say it but holding it in the US probably exacerbated the problem, with a lot of first time fans attending. Of course, if you pay your money you have the right to attend, but you are definitely going to get a different demographic with prices at $500 plus (or whatever). ‘Influencers’ and people cheering for both sides at a match… bloody hell what a nightmare, you have my sympathy, I would be giving them evils (glaring at them) the whole match!! ---
**Author:** ![iamatractorboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iamatractorboy/32/21261_2.png) [@iamatractorboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamatractorboy)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2026, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3638 "2026-07-08T05:31:12Z")
I know it’s been far from easy so far for Argentina, but, on paper, is this the easiest trio of games a team could ever hope for or what? Cape Verde, Egypt, Switzerland?! If England got those 3, people who like to criticise the team (there’s always an awful lot of those by the way) would be raging. ---
**Author:** ![iamatractorboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iamatractorboy/32/21261_2.png) [@iamatractorboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamatractorboy)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2026, 8:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3639 "2026-07-08T08:46:00Z")
A lot of noise this morning about VAR and ‘corruption’ around the Argentina-Egypt match. I mean, it all sounds rather far fetched to me. But looking at the ‘foul’ not given for Salah in the area just before Argentina scored the winner (and the wrestling involving another Egypt player in the area, off the ball), it does highlight the clear absurdity around inconsistency in the foul thresholds when being inside the area, as opposed to outside. If that had been outside the area, what chance VAR would have pulled play back and awarded Egypt a free kick? But because it is in the area, threshold is raised, no foul, goal for Argentina. Or have I got this all wrong? I’ve just read that the match officials for France-Morocco are all from…Argentina. Nice way to put those conspiracy theories to bed, FIFA!! ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2026, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962/3640 "2026-07-08T11:10:05Z")
> [@iamatractorboy](#): > > Dare I say it but holding it in the US probably exacerbated the problem, with a lot of first time fans attending. Of course, if you pay your money you have the right to attend, but you are definitely going to get a different demographic with prices at $500 plus (or whatever). > > ‘Influencers’ and people cheering for both sides at a match… bloody hell what a nightmare, you have my sympathy, I would be giving them evils (glaring at them) the whole match!! You know, soccer already has goalkeepers. It doesn’t need gatekeepers, too. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962.md?page=181) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifa-world-cup-2026-discussion-etc/1023962.md?page=183)