The Verdict That Cannot Be Given: The Courage to Say 'Insufficient Information' in the VAR Era

On 16 June 2026, at the Kazan Arena, France versus Australia, the 58th minute. The ball struck Josh Risdon's hand. Referee Andrés Cunha paused before reaching for a card, put a hand to his ear, and then made that long walk to the monitor at the side of the pitch. He came back and gave the penalty. Antoine Griezmann put the ball in the net. It was the first penalty awarded through VAR in World Cup history. On screen, a decision was glowing like truth itself.

My file holds another kind of incident from that tournament, one I labelled 'the empty frame'. Six or seven camera angles, slow-motion replays, doubt along the handball line — and yet not one frame offers evidence solid enough to give the penalty or to wave it away with confidence. The stands are screaming 'penalty', and the man standing before the monitor has no clean answer. What he can say is this: insufficient information, the on-field decision stands.

That single sentence — 'insufficient information' — is the most undervalued verdict in modern football. And it is the hardest habit of my entire working life.

Context: the language of the law and the language of the feed

The handball clause of Law 12 has never stood still. In 2026 the operative word was 'deliberate' — did the player consciously touch the ball with the hand? In 2026 IFAB added the phrase 'unnaturally bigger'. In 2026-21 came the shoulder line, the position of the arm, and the fine reading of 'natural movement'. The result: the same footage, judged under two different phrases, yields two different verdicts.

The VAR protocol permits intervention in only four categories — goal or no goal, penalty or no penalty, direct red card, and mistaken identity. On top of that sits a threshold: 'clear and obvious error', or else 'serious missed incident'. Stand at that threshold and you see it plainly: VAR does not re-referee the match; it looks only for the obvious.

At the 2026 FIFA Confederations Cup I watched sixteen matches and built a baseline — 42 yellows, 3 reds, 5 penalties; in the final, Chile 0-1 Germany, referee Milorad Mažić. That archive became my mirror in 2026. There, sixty-four matches, 29 penalties, 12 own goals, 29 VAR reviews. These numbers are a structure for me, and standing inside it I re-watched every controversial moment three times.

Core analysis: the database does not shout

I follow one rule — I will not write a referee column until I have verified at least three prior similar incidents. Call it 'precedent before opinion'. The rule was born in a broadcast room in Khulna. After launching Referee's Eye in 2026, I did not go live for three straight months; I built the first twenty-four episodes around the rulebook and the minute-mark. In Khulna I learned that a new feed can change the old rules — the camera position, the timing of the cut, the broadcaster's preference all decide which incident looks 'clear' and which looks 'unclear'.

This is where the crack opens between the broadcast narrative and the language of Law 12. Television shows a sequence of emotion — impact, shout, replay, verdict. The law reads a different sequence — arm position, distance, ball speed, the player's line of sight. Having sifted the frames of sixty-four matches again and again, I have seen that in a large share of controversial incidents the broadcaster's description never cites a single word of the law. So I went back to the 2026 frames to see what the naked eye missed.

When the crowd says penalty, I look for the angle the crowd cannot see. The camera behind the goal often shows how natural the arm's line was; the goal-line camera shows how close the ball came; the wide angle shows where the defender's weight was. The database does not shout; it waits for you to ask the right question.

This is why my writing carries a twenty-four-hour delay. No verdict at the final whistle; only data collection. When the crowd's emotion cools the next day, the sentence of the law becomes visible.

One more variable has entered the recent cycle — the five-substitution rule. Teams with deep squads drag the last twenty minutes into a war of attrition; the wave of substitutions thickens the crowd in the penalty area, while the clear footage of each tangle thins out. I trust the replay, the rulebook and the long walk to the monitor — but when there is no frame worth trusting, I trust the honesty of saying 'no'.

Contrarian view: when the crowd wants a verdict

Here the collision with the comfortable assumption begins. The stands, the social feed, the studio — everyone wants a final verdict, whichever way it falls. The referee who says 'I am not certain' is called weak; the analyst who writes 'insufficient information' is not read. Yet a manufactured verdict costs far more — once printed, it sits in the archive like poison, and later, whenever you try to pull a decision from the file, that poison is the first thing you smell. The market of instant takes is a match played without a referee, so I walk on with my own whistle.

Over the years I have set the sixty-four-match frames, the Khulna feed changes and the Confederations Cup baseline side by side, and the same pattern keeps surfacing: the root of controversy lies in the absence of information. Among the 29 penalties of 2026, nearly every one that stirred the deepest argument had its resolution hidden in a single word of the law — 'deliberate', 'unnatural', 'natural'. Give a verdict without reading the word and confusion is inevitable.

Takeaway: room for the non-verdict

For the next cycle my proposal is simple — let 'non-verdict' become a legitimate headline in the media. Releasing referee audio in some cases would at least let the stands understand what the man before the monitor saw and did not see. And let the analyst face one question: do you truly hold a frame, or only the crowd's shout? If the answer is the second, it is worth saving the courage to lay the pen down — because to say honestly 'insufficient information' is itself a decision.