Good Morning ☀️,

It’s Lucas here, your Chief Predictions Officer at What Are the Odds?

Turns out, VAR decisions change basically nothing about football refereeing. And yeah, we’ve got data. So today, we ask the question — what’s the point?

But more on that later. First, here’s what’s ahead.

What’s ahead in today’s edition of What Are the Odds?:

• VAR changes nothing. So what’s the point? ❓

• Today’s complete match schedule. 🗓️

• Our top pick of the day. ✅

Sharing is caring: Help grow the team and show your friends you care — send them this link https://whataretheodds.io/subscribe

Between now and our next edition, we’ve got two great semifinal matches coming up. (Note: all dates and times are in Eastern Time)

 🇫🇷 France vs Spain 🇪🇸

• Date: Tuesday 14 July; 15:00 (ET)

• Venue: AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England vs Argentina 🇦🇷

• Date: Wednesday 15 July; 15:00 (ET)

• Venue: Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta

Want to get the best odds on this match?

Every World Cup has its villains. And this World Cup has certainly managed to deliver its fair share of them — tournament bloat, questionable economics, a smattering of casual racism, presidential pardons, ticket pricing, hydration breaks, visas, etc., etc., etc… the list goes on.

But while most of these have been somewhat unique to this World Cup event, some controversies have a habit of cropping up again and again across different tournaments. And one of those that’s probably been more prominent than ever at this world cup is the one that sits in a Portakabin full of monitors somewhere near the stadium with a mission objective that reads something like “ruin everyone's night approximately once per fixture.”

And yeah, we’re talking about that one thing that around 75% of football fans (per an FSA survey) believe should be abolished.

The VAR.

Now, of course, the VAR has been unpopular ever since the day it arrived, and things like var-gentina existed before this World Cup. So this isn’t anything new.

But what might be new at this World Cup is the sheer volume of controversy. To put it mildly, this year’s World Cup has been full of controversial decisions, with a seemingly never-ending stream of them.

To pull up just a few of the more notable incidents:

• Egypt vs Argentina: Egypt, already leading the world champions 1-0, sent Mostafa Zico clear to make it 2-0. Shirts came off and celebration ensued. But just as one of the great World Cup upsets was taking shape — and then the sinking feeling. The VAR had spotted a foul on Lisandro Martínez a full length of the pitch away. Then, minutes later, an apparent Mac Allister shirt-pull on the other end went unreviewed entirely as Argentina broke upfield and won it in the 92nd minute. Egypt coach Hossam Hassan detonated accused FIFA of wanting Messi kept in the tournament and went on to file a formal complaint. And he wasn’t alone — Alan Shearer, Rob Green, Ian Wright and Jamie Carragher all jumped in to say they also thought the officiating was inconsistent, with Carragher noting the Zico goal would've stood in any big European league even after review.

• Croatia vs Portugal: In the dying moments of the game, Croatia scored what could’ve been a leveller against Portugal. Then the sensors in the match ball decided it had faintly grazed a Croatian player’s head earlier in the move, which flipped the offside call and wiped the goal.

• England vs Norway: Speaking of sensors in the ball, remember Nyland’s goal kick that appeared to clip an overhead skycam cable and drop weirdly into England’s just the other night? Something which, per the rule book, should mean a stoppage and a dropped ball. The same ball-sensor tech that detected a stray hair against Croatia somehow detected nothing here, so play waved on, Bellingham scored, and England went through. FIFA insisted the sensor showed no contact. Norway did not find this persuasive.

• Senegal vs Belgium: Senegal, ahead almost the whole way and looking set for penalties had to watch the VAR award Belgium a late penalty that ended their tournament in extra time.

Now, if you look at all of these, there’s one pattern that’s consistent across all of them. Complaints about the VAR have little to do with vague feel-good notions like “the rhythm of the game” (which supporters also say the VAR destroys). Instead, every single one comes with an accusation that the VAR is being used to make biased decisions.

So now we have to ask the next logical question — is the VAR actually introducing bias into refereeing decisions?

Fortunately for us, someone’s already attempted to answer this question — an April 2026 paper by economist Seife Dendir (who ran the data on some 15,000 matches before and after VAR) found that the VAR "appears to have had no effect on goals, red cards or penalty kicks." In fact, the only robust change being slightly fewer offsides per game.

And this isn’t the only paper that attempts to answer this question. There’s also a nine-year study of 3,420 Brazilian top-flight matches that found VAR cut offsides and made games slightly longer but produced “no significant changes” in yellows, reds, penalties or goals. And another 2026 meta-analysis that pooled multiple competitions found no meaningful effect on goals scored or home advantage.

So study after study, league after league, the findings are more or less the same — the game with VAR looks (statistically speaking) almost identical to the game without it… save for a few less offsides. And that’s kinda funny in a way. This thing we all hate — this thing that stops the game dead, that turns goal celebrations into nervous glances at the big screen, that has coaches filing complaints — has had no measurable impact on how football actually plays out. In other words, its a whole lot of pain for something that’s basically just a rounding error.

So the next question here is obvious — what’s the actual point?

The easy answer here is to simply point to why the VAR was introduced in the first place. To quote IFAB’s Lukas Brud, “With all the 4G and Wi-Fi in stadia today, the referee is the only person who can’t see exactly what is happening and he’s actually the only one who should. We knew we had to protect referees from making mistakes that everyone can see immediately.”

Now, while this explanation makes perfect sense as a reason to introduce VAR, it doesn’t really do much to justify its continued use. After all, here we are, several years and multiple studies deep into the VAR era, and it doesn’t really seem like anything’s changed. Controversies over refereeing decisions haven’t gone away and, as far as the stats seem to be able to tell, not much else has changed either — the numbers haven’t moved.

But here’s another read.

What if the real point of the VAR wasn’t to improve decision making?

Think about it. Most of the calls causing a stink at this year’s World Cup seem to go in the same direction — toward Argentina and Messi; toward Portugal and Ronaldo; toward Belgium over Senegal; toward England over Norway.

And this isn’t a phenomenon that’s unique to this World Cup, or even to VAR decisions. There’s been plenty of studies in the past which have already established that referee bias towards the more successful team exists. For instance, this 2020 paper by a couple of Norwegian researchers found that successful teams were awarded 110% of the penalties they deserved (11 of 10 identified by the panel) while their less successful opponents received only 12.5% of deserved penalties (1 of 8).

To call that a huge gap is a massive understatement. And it kind of roughly fits the shape of anecdotal controversies we’re seeing at this year’s World Cup — big teams benefiting while smaller teams lose out.

So in a way, if the VAR can be said to be serving one real purpose, it’s arguably not its “intended” one — a simple tool to help referees make better decisions. As has been demonstrated by study after study, nothing’s really changed in our VAR-driven world.

And that begs the question — if the VAR’s just as controversial as old-school “saw it with my own two eyes” refereeing (both from a data-based perspective, and a fan-based perspective), then why bother maintaining it?

Obviously, that’s not a question we can answer here, even if it is something that’s probably worth considering.

⚽ England vs Argentina
🏟️ 2026 FIFA World Cup Semifinals
📅 Wednesday 15 July; 21:00 (Europe/Paris)

• Why we’re watching: It’s the World Cup Semifinals. Duh!

• Top 3 Stats:

  • England is currently #4 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 5W/1D/0L, 13 goals scored, and 6 conceded from 6 World Cup games.

  • Argentina is currently #2 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 6W/0D/0L, 17 goals scored, and 6 conceded from 6 World Cup games.

  • These two haven’t met in a head-to-head in over 2 decades (last meeting was November 2005, which ended Argentina 2-3 England).

• CXSports says: Just about every prediction model we’ve seen pegs this match as essentially being a coin flip. And that’s pretty much how it looks to us. Both of these teams have spent the knockout rounds winning in similarly ugly and dangerous ways — Argentina needed extra time in two of three games (along with a two-goal comeback in the third), while England needed a last-gasp Kane rescue, a ten-man rearguard, and a Bellingham double from behind. And both have been equally unconvincing at the back — England’s conceded in three of their last five, while Argentina were pushed to the edge by Cape Verde, Egypt and Switzerland all exploiting the same flat-midfield open-flank weakness every time.
  
  Still, the name of the game here is to come up with a prediction, so let’s attempt to do that.
  
  To start with Argentina, the case for them is simple. They’ve also never failed once in five previous attempts to progress from a World Cup semifinal. And, they also arrive with the longest winning streak in their tournament history after having scored at least twice in twelve straight World Cup matches. And let’s not forget that they’ve got the pedigree — the best player on the pitch. Messi has eight goals, has extended his all-time record to 21, and produces the decisive moment precisely when it’s least expected. And even in the one game he didn’t score (the Switzerland quarter-final) he still assisted the winner instead. And that’s maybe the strongest argument for Argentina right there — they’ve got the threat of a Messi moment. And if the Messi moment never arrives, their forward line of Lautaro and Álvarez means the threat doesn’t end with him. So if England’s patched-up back line (Quansah suspended, the right-back slot only just settled, Rice below full fitness after illness) gets even slightly loose, this could be over for them.
  
  Of course, there are good reasons to favor England here, too. They are the deeper, more balanced team in a genuinely neutral Atlanta setting. And they carry two match-winning players to Argentina’s one — Kane and Bellingham with six goals each, the first time two players from one nation have both hit six in a single World Cup. Then, there’s also Argentina’s recurring vulnerability — width and set-pieces. And England under Tuchel are the sort of team that can punish exactly that — they’re a tall, physical side with elite delivery from Rice, Saka and Anderson.
  
  So, how does this actually play out?
  
  Well, England probably have a slim chance of controlling this — nobody controls Argentina. However, we’re tempted to say they might just edge it the same way they’ve done so in every knockout tie so far — late, nervously, and probably from a set-piece. We can probably count on Bellingham continuing his knockout run, Messi getting his goal (because he almost always does), and Kane or a substitute delivering the killer blow deep into the night. Of course, if Messi works his magic first, the scoreline could just as easily end up inverted.
  
  In either case, we should probably expect a tense, low-event semifinal that’s only settled by a single act of quality rather than a furious 90 minute goal fest.

• Score prediction: 2-1 for England

Bet Option #1

• Bet: England Victory

• Odds Range: 2.20-2.82

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Over/Under (Under 3.5)

• Odds Range: 1.13-1.26

Make your sportsbook work for you!

That’s a wrap for today. But we’ll be back later in the week once the semifinals are settled with our next edition where we take a look at how this year’s World Cup final is shaping up.

Until then, enjoy the football… and try not to hate the VAR too much.