Why VAR and Pochettino were arguing about different things

When a referee sends a player off and the coach says "it was never intentional", two people are usually talking past each other. The coach is arguing about what was in the player's head. The rule is about what the player's boot did. VAR, the Video Assistant Referee system, does not bridge that gap. It sharpens it.

That is the story of Folarin Balogun's red card against Bosnia yesterday, and it is worth unpacking because the mechanism generalises. Any system that reviews human judgment against a written rule runs into the same problem: the review can only be as precise as the rule it is reviewing, and football's rules on violent conduct are deliberately, structurally fuzzy.

What actually happened, and what was said

Balogun scored in the 45th minute to put the USA 1-0 up. In the 64th, chasing a loose ball, he stepped on the ankle of Bosnia defender Tarik Muharemovic. The referee showed a straight red. VAR reviewed. VAR upheld. The USA finished the match with ten men, Malik Tillman added a free-kick, and the co-hosts advanced 2-0 ¹.

Afterwards Mauricio Pochettino, the USMNT head coach, said the challenge was "never intentional" and "a normal football action" ². That is a coherent thing for a coach to say. It is also, under the actual laws being applied, beside the point.

The rule Balogun was sent off under

The Laws of the Game are maintained by IFAB, the body that writes football's rulebook, and adopted by FIFA. Law 12 covers fouls and misconduct. It defines three tiers of contact:

• Careless — a lack of attention or consideration. No card.
• Reckless — disregard for the danger to, or consequences for, an opponent. Yellow card.
• Using excessive force — endangers the safety of an opponent, or uses excessive force or brutality. Red card ³.

Notice what is not in that list: intent. The rule grades the action, not the state of mind. A player who did not mean to hurt anyone can still commit an act that "endangers the safety of an opponent". Under Law 12 as written, that is a red card, and the player's inner life is not a defence.

This is not an accident of drafting. Football spent decades trying to police intent and gave up, because intent is unknowable in real time and every player accused of a bad tackle sincerely says they did not mean it. Grading the action is the only test a referee can actually apply.

What VAR is actually for

VAR was rolled into the World Cup in 2018 with a narrow remit. It reviews four categories: goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards, and mistaken identity. Within those categories it is not meant to re-referee the match. It is meant to correct "clear and obvious errors" and "serious missed incidents" ⁴.

That phrase is the whole ballgame. VAR does not ask "would I have given this?" It asks "was the on-field decision clearly and obviously wrong?" If the answer is no, even if the VAR official privately would have called it differently, the on-field decision stands.

So when the research file notes that VAR "upheld" Balogun's red card, that is not the same as saying VAR agreed it was a red card. It is saying VAR found no clear and obvious error in the referee's read. Those are different claims, and the difference is the entire design of the system.

Rules-as-code, with fuzzy rules

Here is where the mechanism gets interesting, and where it generalises beyond football.

VAR is a rules-as-code system in the loose sense: a written specification (Law 12), a human decision (the referee's call), and a review layer (VAR) checking the decision against the specification using better evidence (replay, multiple angles). It looks like the kind of oversight loop you would design if you wanted to reduce variance in human judgment.

The problem is that the specification itself is fuzzy. "Excessive force" is not a measurable quantity. There is no threshold in newtons above which a challenge becomes a red card. Reasonable, trained officials watching the same replay can disagree about whether a stamp on an ankle crosses the line, and both can be defensibly applying Law 12.

What review layers can and cannot do. A review layer can fix errors of perception — the referee did not see the contact, the angle was blocked, the speed of play hid the severity. It cannot fix errors of specification — the rule itself does not sharply distinguish the case in front of you from the case next to it. When you add a review pass to a fuzzy specification, you do not resolve the disagreement. You make the disagreement more visible, more slowly, on a bigger screen.

This is why VAR's most-argued calls are still the ones VAR was introduced to fix. Offside, which has a bright-line specification (any part of a playing body-part beyond the second-last defender), got measurably more consistent. Handball and violent conduct, which have fuzzy specifications, did not. The review layer inherits the sharpness of the rule beneath it.

Where the metaphor breaks

I have been calling this "rules-as-code". That is generous. Law 12 is not code. It is prose written to be interpreted by trained humans, and the interpretation is part of the rule, not a bug in it. Football chose fuzziness on purpose, because a bright-line specification for violent conduct would either miss dangerous acts that do not fit the definition, or catch harmless ones that do.

Software people sometimes look at systems like VAR and want to tighten the specification. Add a definition. Add a threshold. Add a decision tree. The lesson from football is that you can do that at the edges (offside), but at the core (what counts as endangering an opponent), tightening the rule makes it worse, not better. The fuzziness is doing work.

What to watch

Two things. First, whether FIFA publishes any post-match clarification on the Balogun decision — the referee committee sometimes does, and those clarifications are the closest thing to a written interpretation of where the reckless-versus-excessive-force line sits in 2026. Second, whether Pochettino's framing shifts. "Not intentional" is a press-conference move, not an appeal ground. If the USA formally challenge the suspension, the argument will have to be recast in Law 12's actual vocabulary, and that is a much harder case to make.

Balogun misses Belgium on 6 July ¹. The rule that put him there will still be there in the next match, applied by different humans, watching different replays, of a different contested moment.

Glossary

VAR Video Assistant Referee; a review team that checks the on-field referee's decisions on goals, penalties, direct red cards, and mistaken identity.

Law 12 The section of football's Laws of the Game covering fouls and misconduct, including the definitions of careless, reckless, and excessive-force contact.

Clear and obvious error VAR's intervention threshold; the on-field decision stands unless the review finds it demonstrably wrong, not merely debatable.

Rules-as-code The general idea of encoding written rules into a system that can apply or review them; works well for bright-line rules, poorly for fuzzy ones.

---

Footnotes and links

Further reading

• IFAB Laws of the Game 2025/26 (full text): https://www.theifab.com/laws-of-the-game-documents/
• Yahoo Sports match report and historical context on the scored-and-sent-off list: https://sports.yahoo.com/soccer/article/2026-world-cup-team-usa-striker-folarin-balogun-shown-red-card-in-second-half-after-first-half-goal-013726475.html

Footnotes

1. CBS News, "U.S. men beat Bosnia and Herzegovina in round of 32," 1 July 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/world-cup-us-bosnia-herzegovina-round-of-32 ↩ ↩²

2. Sportsnet, "USA's Balogun given red card for hard challenge vs Bosnia and Herzegovina," 1 July 2026. https://www.sportsnet.ca/fifa-world-cup/article/usas-balogun-given-red-card-for-hard-challenge-vs-bosnia-and-herzegovina ↩

3. IFAB / FIFA, "Laws of the Game 2025/26," Law 12 — Fouls and Misconduct. https://www.fifa.com/legal/football-rules-regulations/laws-of-the-game ↩

4. IFAB, "Video Assistant Referee (VAR) Protocol," included in Laws of the Game 2025/26. https://www.theifab.com/laws-of-the-game-documents/ ↩