We live in an era obsessed with perfection, and as a result, the world is becoming terribly boring. You cannot buy a toaster without a digital microprocessor monitoring the shade of your sourdough. You cannot drive a modern supercar without an electronic nanny violently grabbing the steering wheel because it thinks a stray leaf is a stray pedestrian. And now, quite catastrophically, the health-and-safety brigade has finally finished murdering football.

If you happened to tune into the World Cup Round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt in Atlanta, you will have witnessed a crime. Not a crime of passion, mind you, but a crime of bureaucracy.

Egypt, a team playing with the sort of unhinged, chaotic joy that makes you glad to have eyes, intercepted the ball deep in their own half. What followed was ninety seconds of absolute, unadulterated sorcery. Haissem Hassan tore down the flank like a man who had left the cooker on at home. Mohamed Salah delivered a pass of such mathematical perfection it belonged in a museum, and Mostafa Ziko smashed it into the back of the net. It was a counter-attack cooked in heaven. It was the reason we watch football.

But then, enter the Video Assistant Referee. A man sitting in a darkened room, surrounded by television screens and probably eating a lukewarm panini.

The goal was disallowed. Why? Because approximately three weeks earlier, and a staggering 110 yards down the pitch, an Egyptian player named Marwan Attia had dared to exist in the same zip code as Lisandro Martínez’s unusually enlarged left big toe. The on-field referee saw it, correctly surmised that it was a microscopic grazing of boots in a contact sport, and waved play on. But VAR disagreed. They rewound the tape, zoomed in until they could see the molecular structure of the boot leather, and decided that this tiny, insignificant scuffle in the car park meant the greatest goal of the tournament had to be deleted.

It is insane. It is a level of pedantry usually reserved for Swiss parking wardens.

The fundamental problem with VAR is that it treats football like a crime scene. Football is not a crime scene. It is a high-speed collision of heavily muscled, adrenaline-fuelled men sprinting on wet grass. If you run at twenty miles an hour next to another man running at twenty miles an hour, you are going to bump into him. It is physics.

But when you slow that contact down to a quarter of the speed, everything changes. A perfectly normal brush of the shoulders suddenly looks like an assassination attempt. A minor clip of the heels looks like a malicious assault. VAR has decided that football should no longer be a contact sport; it should be ballet. Except in ballet, if someone drops their partner, the judges don’t pause the show for four minutes to check if there was a minor shirt-pull during the pirouette.

And then we must talk about the utter stupidity of the “butterfly effect” bias. The rulebook state that VAR can check the “Attacking Phase of Play.” This means if Egypt had won the ball via that tiny foul, passed it sideways, stumbled, and kicked the ball out of bounds for a throw-in, VAR would have remained silent. The foul would be forgotten. Egypt would get away with it.

But because Egypt had the sheer, unmitigated audacity to be brilliant—because they strung together a sequence of world-class passes and scored a masterpiece—they were audited by the tax man. VAR essentially penalises teams for being too good. If you score a brilliant goal, the men in the booths will dig through your past with a fine-tooth comb to find a reason to ruin your day. It is weaponised killjoy-ism.

What this does to the stadium experience is tragic. We used to live for that singular, explosive moment when the ball hits the net. The absolute eruption of raw human emotion. Now? You score a goal, and instead of celebrating, you look at the referee. The players look at the referee. The fans sit in stunned, anxious silence while a man in a booth hundreds of miles away checks his monitors. The high has been completely hijacked by anxiety.

It also completely castrates the referee on the pitch. The poor man with the whistle is no longer the judge; he’s just a middle-manager waiting for instructions from head office. The fans know it, too. The moment a goal like Egypt’s is overturned for an infraction that occurred during the previous administration, the integrity of the match vanishes. For the remaining sixty minutes, every single throw-in, corner, and tackle is met with a chorus of furious boos. The referee loses control because the system has told the world he isn’t actually the one making the decisions.

We were told VAR was introduced to correct “clear and obvious errors.” A ball crossing the line by a yard. A rogue elbow to the jaw. A Frenchman handling the ball like a rugby player. It was meant to be a safety net, not a microscope.

If we carry on down this road, we will end up with a sport that is perfectly fair, perfectly sterile, and completely unwatchable. We will have 90 minutes of players gently jogging around each other, terrified of making contact, waiting for a panel of lawyers in the VAR booth to approve their goals via email.

Egypt deserved that goal. The World Cup deserved that goal. But instead, the beautiful game was dragged into a boardroom, stripped of its soul, and filed away under “Technical Infraction.” And that is a crying shame.