Mohamed Salah's penalty shout against Argentina wasn't just a missed call. It was a feature of a system deliberately built to tolerate disagreement. When Egypt's star went down in the box with his side leading 2-0, the referee waved play on. Argentina counter-attacked, scored, and completed one of the greatest comebacks in World Cup history. Egypt's coach Hossam Hassan called it an injustice. The Egyptian Football Association lodged a formal complaint. Mostafa Zico, whose goal was disallowed earlier, declared the tournament 'fixed.' Yet independent review panels concluded the officials got it right — or at least defensibly so. The disallowed goal followed the letter of the law. The non-penalty was seen as an attacker seeking contact rather than a clear foul. Two reasonable people can watch the same clip and reach opposite conclusions, and the rules were written to allow exactly that. Main Developments VAR's core instruction is to intervene only for a 'clear and obvious error.' That phrase is a deliberate policy choice by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) to preserve referee authority while tolerating inconsistency. For this World Cup, FIFA referees' chief Pierluigi Collina expanded VAR's reach with four new intervention areas. The goalposts are moving. Collina defended the Egypt decision, stating, 'There is no defined limit regarding either the distance from goal or the amount of time between the incident and the goal. We believe that a foul is a foul.' Luka Modric, whose 24-year World Cup career ended in a 2-1 defeat to Portugal, described the problem bluntly. 'For some things it's useful, but it's either being used incorrectly or selectively, depending on the size of the team or whatever else,' he said. 'If it's a 200 per cent mistake, then you intervene. If it's not, if it's in a grey area, then there's no reason to get involved.' That grey area is exactly what IFAB has accepted as the cost of keeping the game moving. Read also: 3 record-breaking performances redefine Diamond League Monaco meet Background VAR was introduced to eliminate clear howlers, not to re-litigate every marginal call. The 'clear and obvious' threshold was meant to preserve the referee's authority and the flow of the game. But this World Cup also introduced mandatory three-minute hydration breaks in every half of all 104 matches — not triggered by heat thresholds, but on a fixed clock regardless of temperature, roof, or kick-off time. FIFA official Manolo Zubiria was explicit: three minutes, whistle to whistle, every game, no exceptions. The breaks have drawn widespread criticism. Uruguay coach Marcelo Bielsa said they 'add nothing and take away a lot.' France coach Didier Deschamps noted, 'It's not two-half times, it is four-quarter times.' Roy Keane called them 'a timeout,' arguing that 'we love football because of the pace of the game… what it's doing is stopping the flow.' Broadcasters have used the pauses to show commercials, with Fox in the United States going straight to ads. Virgil van Dijk, the Netherlands captain, said it felt like they were 'playing not to get injured' and that 'maybe they shouldn't try to Americanise the game and make it a commercial thing.' Why It Matters The hydration breaks reveal a contradiction at the heart of FIFA's approach. Experts told the BBC that hydration break advertising could generate more than $250 million in revenue. FIFA president Gianni Infantino denied that money had anything to do with it, insisting the policy was purely about 'equal conditions' for all teams. But an organisation that can insert a guaranteed, weather-independent stoppage into every single match isn't one that treats 'protecting the flow of the game' as an inviolable principle. It protects flow selectively — fast when a marginal foul call is on the line, negotiable when there's a fixed commercial window to fill. Egypt's grievance was never really about missing footage. It was about the fact that the rule allows two reasonable people to watch the identical clip and land in different places — and the sport is fine with that. The same replay that shows one shirt-pull can be waved away as innocuous contact and another given as a stonewall penalty, and both rulings can be defended as correct under the current wording. The honest answer to 'why doesn't sport just fix this' isn't that nobody has thought about it. A fully objective system is a myth even the people running these sports don't fully believe in. What's Next The Egypt-Argentina incident has already prompted the Egyptian FA to demand an investigation into 'double standards.' FIFA has not announced any formal review of the VAR protocol. The hydration breaks will continue through the knockout stages, with no indication of reconsideration. The broader question — whether IFAB will ever define a fixed bar for what counts as a foul — remains open. For now, the sport's governing bodies seem content with a system that produces defensible outcomes rather t