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The Problem With VAR at the 2026 World Cup Isn’t the Technology—It’s Who Interprets It
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A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to. That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on. The nonprofit, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is moving fast. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019. Current AI operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech, she told TechCrunch. The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce — bringing total committed funding to $400 million. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said. The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, belongs to a private company. “If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it’s going to change every aspect of everyone’s life, there has to be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.” Half the world’s spoken languages face extinction. “And with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,” Bdeir said. When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said. Not just about language An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either,” she said. Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data. Current’s first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities (not tech companies) control. Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent. Who owns the data? On the question of data ownership, Bdeir didn’t mince words. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a c
Mere moments after Argentina lost to France in a Round of 16 match during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, commentators were already predicting it would be his final time on a World Cup pitch. “This was Lionel Messi’s final World Cup match, surely,” one stated, “and maybe his final game for his country.” Messi was 31 at the time, and many assumed they had just watched his last appearance on soccer’s biggest stage.They were wrong.Instead, Messi came back four years later to lift the trophy in Qatar. Then he came back again this year at 39. However, Messi is not the exception any more.Cristiano Ronaldo, 41, has said that this World Cup will be his last after Portugal’s Round of 16 exit following the team’s loss to Spain. Brazil’s Neymar, 34, too, announced his retirement from international football, as did Germany’s Manuel Neuer, 40. Meanwhile, Guillermo Ochoa, who turned 41 this month, is stepping away from professional football after becoming the first goalkeeper to make six World Cup squads.Even as this World Cup has felt like one long farewell tour, for many of these players, the goodbye came years later than anyone expected.While there isn’t a definitive global dataset comparing retirement ages across generations, the evidence points in one direction: football’s elite has been getting older for decades. A 2019 peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers of Psychology tracking nearly 30 seasons of UEFA Champions League football found the average age of players rose from 24.9 years in 1992-93 to 26.5 years by 2017-18. That trend is now on full display at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which had eight players in their forties—more than every previous edition combined—including Cape Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha, one of the tournament’s breakout stars.What’s striking is that this celebration of more veteran players on the pitch is happening during an era of football that has produced teenage stars like Lamine Yamal, Endrick, and Bara Sapoko Ndiaye. Soccer isn’t necessarily getting older because young players have disappeared; it’s getting older because veterans are leaving later.Research suggests professional footballers still reach their physical peak in their mid-to-late twenties, though the exact age depends on position. And while aging is gradual, players in their thirties begin to lose their explosive speed and the stamina to maintain the high-intensity running that modern soccer demands most.A long-term study of Spain’s top players found these reported losses in endurance were most notable among external defenders, external midfielders, and forwards, whose roles rely on explosive acceleration to either score a goal or shield their keeper’s box. Central defenders and central midfielders, meanwhile, became more accurate passers with age, suggesting that positioning, anticipation, and decisionmaking increasingly compensate for fading speed.Messi may be the best example of how elite players adapt with age. Rather than constantly chasing the ball, he often spends long stretches walking, reading the game before deciding exactly when to get involved. According to The Athletic, FIFA tracking data shows Messi has spent 63 percent of his movement at this World Cup walking, conserving energy for the moments that matter most.This just goes to prove that sports science hasn’t changed the biology of aging—it changed how soccer clubs respond to it. A 2024 review of athletes with extended careers found a correlation between professionals staying at the top of their game and increasingly individualized training.Instead of prescribing the same program to an entire squad, coaches now tailor workloads around a player’s injury history, recovery, training response, and physical capacity.However, as players get older, experience becomes a competitive advantage. Veteran footballers increasingly compensate for declining physicality with sharper decisionmaking, game intelligence, and a better understanding of their own limits.To understand what sep
The penultimate Round of 16 match at the 2026 World Cup between Argentina and Egypt was marked not just by exceptional goals, great saves, and fans devoted to their teams. The match also sparked one of the most widely discussed controversies surrounding the video assistant referee system, known as VAR, a technology designed to assist on-field officials in making fairer decisions, but whose use has been criticized for allegedly favoring certain teams.Egypt was eliminated from the tournament with a 3-2 loss to Argentina, after having held a two-goal lead. The Egyptian Football Association argued that “the failure to properly use VAR” had influenced several refereeing decisions that affected the final score. Consequently, it filed a formal protest with FIFA to demand an investigation into the alleged inconsistencies.In a statement posted on social media, the governing body of Egyptian soccer emphasized that “the Egyptian Football Association cannot remain silent regarding the refereeing decisions observed during the match against Argentina.” Several experts and specialized analysts, both locally and internationally, have pointed out controversial refereeing incidents that influenced the course of the match. This underscores the importance of maintaining the highest standards of integrity, fairness, and transparency in refereeing, particularly in a competition of the magnitude and importance of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.”Similar complaints—such as goals disallowed for offside calls that were not signaled on the field—have been a constant throughout this year’s World Cup. Some critics argue that, despite the use of technology, such plays are judged differently with the apparent intent of benefiting certain national teams. Others argue that VAR, in addition to disrupting the flow of the game, is a tool that could be used to adjust refereeing decisions and, once again, favor certain teams.Amid these discussions, several questions arise. Can VAR technology alone guarantee fair decisions? Do the controversies stem from the system’s limitations or from its misuse? Are all referees participating in the 2026 World Cup truly trained to use this assistive tool?VAR was first used in a World Cup during the 2018 tournament in Russia, after being incorporated into the Laws of the Game as “a support tool for the on-field refereeing team,” according to FIFA. Since then, the system has been implemented in more than 100 competitions around the world, including the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.The platform has access to 42 broadcast cameras, eight of which provide super-slow-motion footage and four of which offer ultra-slow-motion footage. In addition, the system has access to feeds from cameras that use semi-automated technology to detect offsides, as well as all cameras from the FIFA host network.All this information is made available to a refereeing team consisting of a video assistant referee and three assistants, who individually review different angles to make a decision in specific cases where VAR can intervene. Any potential anomalies or infractions are reported by the video assistant referee to the head referee, who receives the footage on the field to assess the possible infraction.In the two previous World Cups, VAR assisted the head referees in reviewing goals and infractions leading to a goal; decisions on penalty kicks and the actions that led to them; direct red cards; and cases of mistaken identity.For this edition of the World Cup, FIFA added new situations eligible for review. In principle, VAR can now intervene to correct clearly erroneous second yellow cards and prevent unjust send-offs. In addition, the system assists in detecting blocking, shoving, offsides, or offensive fouls prior to the taking of a free kick or corner kick.Armando Archundia, a former Mexican World Cup referee, adds in an interview with WIRED en Español that features were also incorporated to detect infractions related to the so-called Prestianni-Vinícius Rule, whic
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