​Croatia’s World Cup dream teetered on a knife-edge, seconds from collapse, just as Portugal stood on the brink of advancing to the knockout rounds. Ivan Perisic lofted a long, desperate cross into the penalty area. The ball ricocheted off bodies like a pinball, then, against all odds, caromed into the net. Goooool! The crowd erupted, and fate seemed to have offered Croatia a second chance.
Yet amid the revelry in Toronto, Norwegian referee Espen Eskas stood at the center of the celebration, cupping an ear as he listened to a voice half a continent away in Dallas. The instruction was clear: review the goal via the video assistant referee, or VAR. Eskas obliged, trudging toward a TV monitor and watching the replay again and again. More than two and a half minutes after the ball hit the net, he disallowed the goal. Perisic’s cross had brushed the hair of teammate Igor Matanovic, leaving Mario Pasalic in an offside position when the ball reached him near the far post. The contact was barely perceptible to the naked eye, but a high-tech sensor inside the ball confirmed it.
A VAR review led to the reversal of a Croatia goal during its 2–1 loss to Portugal in Toronto, effectively ending Croatia’s tournament. VAR’s decisive intervention capped a summer in which the technology exerted outsized influence on the World Cup, reshaping outcomes and sparking debate.
It was not supposed to be this way. When VAR was introduced to soccer nine years ago, its mission seemed straightforward: to alert the head referee to potential clear and obvious errors or serious missed incidents. That was the promise laid out by Major League Soccer, one of the first leagues to deploy the system, in the initial news release announcing VAR’s arrival. “It was really to stop the headlines,” said Mark Geiger, who helped implement VAR as an MLS referee. “These super-egregious errors in a game that impact the outcome. The mantra for VAR was always minimum interference but maximum benefit.”
Under the VAR framework, officials sit before a bank of monitors in a centralized control room, reviewing match footage in real time and advising the on-field referee of potential mistakes. If the video assistant referees believe a mistake occurred, they communicate that through an earpiece worn by the officiating referee. If the on-field official agrees, they will halt play, signal a review by making a motion that resembles a rectangle TV screen, and then observe the play themselves on a sideline monitor before confirming or reversing the initial decision.
The system is often likened to other sports’ technological aids: a ball-tracking review in baseball’s Automated Ball-Strike system, Hawk-Eye in tennis, and the centralized instant replay formats that have long governed the NFL and NBA. Each has both corrected errors and fueled debate, leaving fans and players to weigh the benefits of greater accuracy against the costs of disruption and controversy. The Croatia–Portugal moment in Toronto was a stark reminder of why such debates persist, illustrating how VAR can change the course of a tournament in an instant.