The referee and the bulletproof vest - by Jamie Skella
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The referee and the bulletproof vest<br>Every real fairness system makes enemies
Jamie Skella<br>Jul 08, 2026
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Egypt met Argentina in the round of 16 of the 2026 World Cup, where pivotal systems were called into question. I watched at midnight from a hotel in Malaysia, coincidentally in town to speak at a conference on systems design. With Egypt in front, a Mostafa Ziko finish was ruled out after a review found a shirt held and a foot trodden on in the build-up. Argentina went on to win 3-2, and Egypt’s coach went to the cameras to declare the thing rigged, saying the world had seen it. Nobody in the room I was in actually saw it that way, not even the Africans supporting their neighbours who had been high-fiving me not long before. The foul was real and the call was right.<br>By morning, plenty of people had reached different conclusions, with many calling for the end of VAR.<br>The best version of the objection deserves repeating, because it is better than the usual complaint about technology in sport. Football, it goes, is a bunch of humans kicking a ball while a clock winds down. The simplicity is the game. The theatrics, the injuries, the arguments, a referee calling it as they see it. That is why it became the world game: it is accessible to everyone. You don’t even need shoes. The sport survived a century of wrong calls. Only the elite level plays with a video assistant anyway; every kid on a Saturday plays without one. So what, exactly, is the technology protecting?<br>I have been hearing versions of that argument my whole career, and almost never about football.<br>The stakes changed, not the game
The game in the park and the game on the world stage are the same activity. They are no longer the same institution. World football is a business. The team that lifts this trophy takes home fifty million dollars, before sponsorship and the economics of a deep run. That money changes clubs, lives and, in some cases, countries. Without it there is no global stage.<br>Money changes the threat model. When an outcome is worth that much, someone is working out how to influence it. Match-fixing is as old as professional sport. Integrity systems like VAR actually exist to protect the stakes, not the kicking. Not the game specifically, but the business of the game. A wrong call in a park game costs pride. Yet a wrong call on the world stage moves nine-figure sums, and sums like that attract people who would prefer they moved in their direction.<br>When fairness makes enemies
Years ago I designed, and led the development of, a world-first technology for making elections harder to tamper with. I won the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Award for it. In a private room at an international mayors conference in South Korea, an official from Afghanistan offered me advice rather than an award: if I brought it to his country, I should wear a bulletproof vest.<br>Not because it didn’t work. Because it did. It would interfere with people who had already arranged how the outcome was going to go, and people like that do not lodge complaints through official channels.<br>That conversation has followed me ever since. When power or money rides on an outcome, someone will attempt to control it. The purpose of an integrity system is to make that harder. A fairness mechanism that upsets nobody is usually a fairness mechanism that changes nothing.<br>Compared to what?
The strongest card against VAR is that it fails. It does. But no system is perfect. Saying “VAR makes mistakes” is a description, not an argument. No system is infallible, including the one that came before this one. The only honest comparison is against the predecessor, not against perfection. We simply need progress.<br>The old errors were absorbed into folklore. A blown call lived on as a grievance and a pub story, owned by nobody, correctable by nothing. The new errors are visible, timestamped and replayable. That is the paradox of instrumenting judgement: better systems make errors more legible, and legible errors feel worse than the invisible ones they replaced. The overturns VAR got right this tournament were shown on the same broadcasts. Nobody messaged me about those.<br>The sharpest objection survives all of this, though. Argentina’s winner came on a counter that Egypt insist began with a foul on Mohamed Salah, and that one wasn’t reviewable. The protocol reaches some injustices and not others. That is a scope decision, and scope can be widened. But it is true that a system applied unevenly reads as uneven justice, and uneven justice erodes trust faster than no system at all. If you promise fairness by instrument, you are held to the instrument.<br>Every system gets its disallowed goal
The reason this debate follows me around is that we are now instrumenting judgement far more consequential than a striker’s run. AI systems that read, decide and act are being threaded through medicine, credit,...