Kazan 2026: Two VAR Penalties and the Gap Inside Law 12

The 58th minute, Kazan Arena, June 16, 2026. Antoine Griezmann collected the ball inside the penalty area, turned, and had his trailing leg clipped by Josh Risdon. Referee Andrés Cunha, of Uruguay, did not blow his whistle. He stood still, touched his earpiece, left his position, walked to the touchline and bent over the monitor set inside a transparent plastic case. Thirty seconds later he pointed to the spot.

For the first time in the 88-year history of the World Cup, a penalty was awarded on video evidence. Four minutes later came another, this time for Samuel Umtiti's hand on the French side. The match ended 2-1 to France. What Kazan left behind was not the scoreline, but a question about process.

CONTEXT: A PROTOCOL WRITTEN BEFORE KICK-OFF

World Cup 2026 was the first tournament to use VAR across all 64 matches. The International Football Association Board (IFAB) approved the formal protocol at its March 2026 meeting in Bogotá, after years of trials in the Bundesliga, Serie A, MLS and the French Coupe de la Ligue.

That protocol rested on three pillars. VAR could intervene in four categories only: goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards and mistaken identity. The intervention threshold was "a clear and obvious error", not "a decision that can be argued about". And the final decision remained with the on-field referee: VAR advises, the referee decides.

I watched France against Australia from a studio in Russia, with two screens in front of me — one live feed, one replay that opened after every incident. I said on air that the Referee Review Area was being operated off-protocol. I was called rigid for it. But that night is why I began reading match reports before reading the news, because a match report does not know how to lie.

TWO INCIDENTS, ONE UNDEFINED THRESHOLD

Risdon chased Griezmann, his right leg trailing, his knee catching the French forward's calf. The ball had left Griezmann's foot about half a second earlier. From Cunha's angle the contact was hidden behind the body. He did not whistle. VAR stepped in.

The question is the threshold, not whether there was contact. Cunha had made the no-penalty call in a fraction of a second. To overturn it, VAR had to prove that call clearly wrong. A contact at thirty kilometres an hour, replayed at twenty-five frames per second, is not clear at all.

In the 62nd minute the ball looped up inside the French box. Umtiti jumped, his left arm extended, the ball struck the hand. Cunha walked to the touchline again, bent to the monitor again, and this time pointed the other way. Mile Jedinak made it 1-1.

The crux sits in Law 12 of the Laws of the Game as they stood then. Handling was defined as "a deliberate act of a player making contact with the ball with the hand or arm". Deliberate is a psychological category, not a measurement. No sensor reads intent. The referee has to reason from three indicators: the movement of the hand towards the ball, the distance between the opponent and the ball, and the position of the arm in relation to the body.

Added together, those three indicators do not form a formula. They form a grey zone. Inside a grey zone, two good referees can reach two opposite decisions and both be right under the law.

I compared the two incidents against a single set of criteria: level of contact, ball-to-player distance, body position, speed of approach and the moment the ball left the foot. Both sat right on the threshold. Neither was a clear and obvious error in the literal sense. Both were overturned anyway.

The VAR protocol was designed to correct obvious mistakes, but at Kazan it was used to correct arguable ones — and those two categories are a long way apart.

One technical detail is rarely mentioned. Under the 2026 protocol, for subjective decisions such as handball, the referee is encouraged to review the monitor himself. For objective decisions such as offside or ball out of play, the referee may simply take the information through the earpiece and decide immediately. Cunha got the subjective part right: he went to the monitor both times. What he got wrong lay elsewhere.

He did not tell the crowd what he was reviewing. In a match between two teams unfamiliar with the technical explanation, those thirty silent seconds became a space for every inference to fill. The stands had no data. The stands had only feeling.

EMOTION IS NOT NOISE

When the match ended, most Australian commentary circled one line: VAR stole the game. In France people said the opposite: VAR saved justice. Two sentences, one shared logic — both assigned a will to the machine.

The machine has no will. It has a set of frames. The will belongs to the person in the sealed room in Moscow, the person with the whistle, and the person who wrote the protocol in Bogotá. The problem at Kazan 2026 is that those three groups never sat down together to define one word: clear.

I have heard the argument that Australia should stay calm because over the long run VAR will be fair. That argument is right statistically and wrong experientially. A team does not live inside a long series. It lives inside one half. And inside one half, a wrongly awarded penalty is a loss that cannot be recovered.

Fan emotion is valid data. If a protocol makes tens of thousands of people in the stands feel excluded from the decision-making process, that protocol has a design problem, not merely an execution problem.

A PROPOSED CLAUSE

On the evidence available, a provisional conclusion: both of Cunha's decisions at Kazan 2026 sat inside the lawful margin, but the process that produced them was never standardised at the point that mattered.

A proposed amendment, written in the format of a trial clause: over a twelve-month trial in top-tier competitions, when a referee conducts a review at the Referee Review Area, the minimum information published to spectators shall be the category of incident under review and the legal criterion being applied. The referee retains the final decision; the review must close within ninety seconds. The cost of this clause is close to zero: one signal line, one graphic board, one announcement.

A penalty can be corrected. A gap in the law cannot be corrected by blaming the man with the whistle. Kazan left behind a lesson that still holds for today's competitions: the offside line was never straight — it is only today that we can see how it bends.