Our Summer of Sport series connects what's happening on the pitch with what's happening in your organization: how teams perform under pressure, how technology earns trust, and how to move fast without falling apart.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is running one of the most precise officiating operations in sports history. It has also generated some highly contentious calls. It turns out, the same precision that's unlocked a new level of accuracy in officiating is also producing the backlash.
Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT) and the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) have changed how football makes its most consequential calls. VAR, introduced at the 2018 World Cup, gives a dedicated team of video officials the ability to review on-field decisions (goals, red cards, penalties, mistaken identity) using multiple camera angles and replay footage. SAOT, which debuted at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, goes further: twelve dedicated cameras track 29 data points per player 50 times per second, building a real-time 3D model of every player on the pitch, while a sensor inside the match ball captures the exact millisecond it is played. The result is offside decisions rendered in seconds, based on data the human eye cannot process in real time.
Both systems have delivered what they were designed to deliver. Wrongful red cards have been reversed, legitimate goals confirmed, and offside calls completed in a fraction of the time with less room for human error. The accuracy is measurable and real, but on the other hand, so is the disruption to the experience of fans, players, and the officials using the tech.
This catch-22 isn't unique to football. Across every sector where AI-driven tools have been deployed, organizations are running into the same friction: technology that works, and people who haven't been brought along far enough to trust it. The disruption tends not to come from the tools failing. It comes from the change arriving before anyone has been given a reason to believe in it, and from the precision of the output outpacing people's ability to use it well.
What the 2026 World Cup's Most Controversial VAR Decisions Reveal
Precision creates its own friction. When a goal gets disallowed because a player's hair grazed the ball, or a stoppage-time winner is chalked off because a toe crossed a line, the call can feel arbitrary to everyone watching, even when it's correct. These are what happens when technology works exactly as designed, in an environment that wasn't fully prepared for it. Three calls from this tournament show exactly how that gap opens up.
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Norway vs. England. In the quarter-final in Miami, broadcast replays appeared to show the ball from a Norway goal kick clipping one of the stadium's overhead skycam cables before dropping to England's Elliot Anderson, who helped set up Jude Bellingham's equalizer moments later. The sensor contradicted the visual evidence, and FIFA's explanation that, "the ball's internal data showed no contact," asked fans to trust an invisible data point over footage they could see with their own eyes. That's a harder sell in a tournament where the same technology had already disallowed a goal because a player's hair grazed the ball. When a system's use feels granular in one moment and blind in another, the accuracy question starts to morph into one about consistency. That question can undermine buy-in for the whole framework.
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The Balogun red card. In the Round of 32 against Bosnia-Herzegovina, USMNT forward Folarin Balogun was sent off following a VAR review after incidental contact with a Bosnian defender. Both players were challenging for the ball. FIFA later invoked Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code to suspend the suspension, allowing Balogun to play against Belgium in the Round of 16. Belgium's football association questioned publicly how a ruling made through official VAR protocol could be reversed via an administrative provision. The technology surfaced the incident. The human process that followed created the controversy.
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Croatia vs. Portugal. Deep into stoppage time, Joško Gvardiol appeared to pull Croatia level with a dramatic equalizer. VAR disallowed it. The sensor inside the Adidas Trionda match ball detected that Igor Matanović had made contact in the build-up, a touch so slight it amounted to a brush of his hair, placing Marko Pašalić offside. In every previous World Cup, that goal stands. The technology to catch it simply didn't exist before. Croatia manager Zlatko Dalić said VAR had ruined the spirit of the game. The more precise the tool, the harder it becomes for people to verify its conclusions, and the wider the gap between the decision and the trust in it.
Each of these decisions was technically sound. The backlash came from the same place every time: the gap between what the technology can do and what the people around it were prepared to trust.
How to Build Organizational Trust Before New Technology Goes Live
The pattern across these incidents isn't hard to read: accurate technology, insufficient preparation for what that accuracy looks like in practice, and no clear plan for when the tool and the human process collide. That combination is what most organizations face when they move too fast on a deployment.
Three things tend to make a difference.
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Make the reasoning visible, not just the output. The SAOT broadcast failure during Switzerland's match against Qatar illustrated this clearly: when viewers couldn't see the 3D graphic explaining the call, a correct decision looked like a black box. The same dynamic plays out in organizations every time an AI flags a risk, a model recommends a hire, or an automated system rejects a transaction. People need to understand how the system reached its conclusion, especially when the stakes are high. The output alone is rarely enough.
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Build the organizational infrastructure before you go live. The Balogun situation exposed a gap between what the VAR protocol dictated and what the administrative process allowed, creating a collision nobody had planned for. In organizations, these gaps appear when escalation paths aren't defined, edge cases haven't been thought through, and the people responsible for the tool and the people responsible for the process haven't aligned. Deployment readiness covers all of that, not just the technical configuration.
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Track adoption, not just performance. A tool that produces accurate results and a workforce that routes around it is a failed deployment, regardless of what the accuracy metrics say. The more useful measures in the first year of any new system are behavioral: Are people using it as intended? Are they building workarounds? Is confidence in the output growing or eroding? Those answers tell you whether the technology is actually landing.
What Comes After the Technology Decision
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be remembered, in part, as a tournament where the officiating technology worked and the reception was complicated. That combination is a useful case study because it separates two questions that tend to get conflated: whether the tool is capable, and whether the organization around it is ready.
At North Highland, we work with organizations at exactly that point: after the technology decision has been made, when the harder work of adoption, trust-building, and change management begins. If you're rolling out new tools and finding that resistance is outlasting the rollout, that's worth a conversation.
