I'm Not Sure I Trust the Football Anymore

The thing I can't shake

I watched most of the 2026 World Cup the way I've watched every one since I was a kid: too invested, shouting at a screen, taking it far more personally than a grown adult should. And somewhere around the knockout rounds I noticed a feeling I'd never really had about football before. It wasn't anger at a bad decision. It was something flatter and worse. I stopped being sure the decisions meant anything.

That's the thing I can't shake, and it's why I wanted to write this down rather than just moan about it in a group chat. Not "the referee robbed us." I've felt that a hundred times and it's part of the fun, honestly. This was different. This was watching a goal get chalked off, or a nailed-on penalty wave away, and instead of thinking "terrible call," thinking "I genuinely don't know if that was incompetence or something worse, and I have no way of ever finding out." Once you're there, the sport changes. A good game and a rigged one start to feel the same, and that's a horrible place to watch football from.

I've been here before, sort of

Nineteen eighty-six was the first World Cup I was really conscious of. I was nine. Argentina played England in the quarter-final and Maradona punched the ball into the net, and the thing people forget now is that at the time you couldn't actually see it. Not even on the replays. We had a squareish CRT in the corner and the pictures coming out of Mexico weren't up to much, so even slowed down it wasn't clear what had happened. I could tell from the players' arms going up and the tone of the commentary that something was wrong, that they were all shouting handball, but the telly never really showed it to me. It was the photographers who caught it in the end, a still frame in the paper, and honestly it's still hard to make out on the footage even now.

And here's the honest bit: I was nine, so I read the headline the next day, and then I went down the school field to play cricket. It didn't ruin football for me. It didn't stop me watching the next tournament, or the one after that, or every one since. One player cheated, everybody worked out what had happened, everybody argued about it, and the game carried on. That's a kind of injustice you can live with, because you know exactly what it was and who did it.

What I felt this summer is not that. It's a different animal entirely, and it took me a while to work out why it lands so much heavier than a bloke handballing a goal forty years ago.

I'm not saying it was fixed

Let me be clear, because this stuff gets people worked up. I am not claiming any match was fixed. I can't prove that. Nobody shouting about it online can prove it either, and half of what gets passed around as evidence is nonsense or made up. If you came here for a conspiracy theory with Argentina at the centre of it, this isn't that.

What bothers me is smaller and, I think, more true. Take the Egypt match, the one everyone ended up arguing about. Egypt had a goal ruled out because, some twenty seconds earlier and the better part of a pitch away, a player had reportedly caught an opponent's foot. Technically a foul, sure. But then at the other end, in the actual penalty area, in the build-up to the goal that knocked Egypt out, there were incidents that looked at least as clear and VAR apparently never took a second look. I genuinely can't tell you whether that was one crew being wildly inconsistent on the day, or something worse. That's the whole point. Same competition, same technology, opposite standards depending on which end of the pitch you were at, and no way for me to know why.

And yes, I'm an England fan, so treat this next bit with the pinch of salt it deserves, but there's a pattern the pundits kept circling that isn't really about any one team. Referees seem to grant a sort of amnesty for the opening fifteen or twenty minutes, letting the heavy challenges go before anyone reaches for a card. Three minutes into the England semi-final, Fernandez caught Elliot Anderson from behind with an arm to the back of the head, and it was a foul and nothing else. No card, no VAR. It shaped the final too, where the first booking again didn't arrive until the back end of the first half. Both games got dragged into a scrappy, niggly opening because the officials let it happen, and Spain, to their credit, were just good enough to keep playing football through it rather than be pulled down into it. Maybe that early leniency is just how you manage a big occasion so it isn't ruined by an early sending-off, and there's a decent argument for it. But an early-leniency window quietly rewards whoever is happiest to foul cynically in it, and once you've noticed that, you spend the first twenty minutes wondering whose game plan it's really serving. Same fog as everything else: I can't tell you it was bias, and I can't tell you it wasn't.

It wasn't only that game. A quarter-final got handed an officiating crew drawn entirely from a single rival nation, which even if the crew were spotless is the sort of appointment a serious organisation just doesn't make, because you're supposed to avoid the appearance of it. A national broadcaster ran a straight-faced piece asking whether the holders were being handed an easy ride. And when reasonable people, not just angry fans, start taking that question seriously, something has already broken, whatever the truth of any single call. We've reached a place where the accusation and the denial carry exactly the same weight, because there's no longer anyone left that both sides trust to settle it.

Why I don't give them the benefit of the doubt

Here's the part that turned my low-level unease into something firmer, and it has almost nothing to do with this year's matches. It's what FIFA spent the last decade doing to the people who were supposed to keep it honest. This is the documented stuff, the part that isn't rumour, and once you've read it you stop extending much benefit of the doubt.

Start with why it mattered so much. In 2015 the whole rotten edifice came down: US indictments, dawn arrests in a Zurich hotel, the end of the Blatter era. FIFA responded with a big show of reform, and the centrepiece was independence. The ethics and governance committees were meant to be built so that the people policing FIFA could not simply be fired by the president for doing their job. That was the promise. What happened next is the story.

Gianni Infantino won the presidency in 2016, elected on a ticket of cleaning the place up. Pretty much everything from here you can file under the heading of weird stuff that's happened on Infantino's watch.

In 2017, at the Congress in Bahrain, the FIFA Council removed the two men running the ethics court, investigator Cornel Borbely and judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, without warning. They were in the middle of hundreds of live cases at the time. On their way out they said plainly that the removal had "incapacitated" FIFA's ability to police corruption and was politically motivated. The bodies built specifically to be untouchable had just been shown to be very touchable indeed.

Around the same time they pushed out Miguel Maduro, the independent chair of the governance committee, and this one is worth the detail because it's so blatant. Maduro had blocked the Russian deputy prime minister Vitaly Mutko from taking a seat on the FIFA Council, correctly citing FIFA's own rules against state interference in football, with Mutko's name attached to the Russian state doping scandal on top. For applying the rules as written, he was removed. He later testified to a UK parliamentary committee that he'd been leaned on to reverse the decision because barring Mutko would be, as it was put to him, a disaster for the 2018 World Cup in Russia and a threat to the president's own position. When he wouldn't fold, he was gone. Two genuinely serious independent figures, a former UN human rights commissioner among them, resigned in protest at what they were watching.

Then they rewrote the rulebook. The 2018 revision of the Code of Ethics was, according to leaked emails reported at the time, shaped from the top, with instructions to rein in the ethics secretariat's power to open its own investigations. The revised code quietly introduced a ten-year time limit on prosecuting bribery and misappropriation, which, given that financial crimes of that kind routinely take longer than a decade to unpick, functions as a slow-acting amnesty. It added a clause letting FIFA pursue anyone who "defames" it, a handy muzzle for insiders. And, almost too on the nose to be real, the word "corruption" was removed from the English version of the document. You could not write a clearer statement of intent if you tried.

The last one is the Swiss thread, and it reads like a thriller. Across 2016 and 2017 the president held a series of secret, undocumented meetings with Michael Lauber, then Switzerland's attorney general, while Lauber's own office was actively investigating corruption in football. When those meetings came to light, Lauber eventually resigned after a federal court found he'd breached his duties and misled people about the encounters. A special prosecutor, Stefan Keller, was appointed to look into the fallout and opened criminal proceedings against the president himself, citing indications of abuse of public office and breach of official secrecy. And then, in 2021, the president's lawyers succeeded in having Keller removed from the case on grounds of bias. His replacements dropped the whole thing in 2023 without a single charge, saying their investigation had by then invalidated the suspicions, and the president declared a full and clear victory over his "envious and corrupt" detractors.

You don't have to believe every one of those episodes was sinister to see the shape they make together. One by one, deliberately, every person or body that could independently look at what FIFA does and say "yes, this was clean" was weakened, removed, or absorbed. And that is the whole problem, because it means that now, when something on the pitch looks off, there is nobody impartial left to check it. FIFA investigating itself and finding nothing wrong isn't reassuring. It's the punchline.

What's actually being lost

This is why Egypt's disallowed goal sits differently in me than Maradona's handball ever did. In 1986 it was a player. You could see who did it, you knew what it was, you could be furious and then let it go, because the game itself, the competition, the men running it, none of that was in question. Now the suspicion has climbed all the way up. It's not one cheat you can point at. It's the referees, and the technology, and the suits who decide who referees what, and the fact that the people who were meant to keep all of them honest have been shown the door. You can get over a handball. You can't get over not knowing whether the whole thing is straight.

Because trust is the entire thing football is selling. Not the football itself, the belief that it's real. That the team lifting the trophy actually earned it, under rules applied the same to everyone. Ninety minutes of grown men kicking a ball is only worth caring about because you believe the result is honest. Take that away and you're just watching very fit people run around a very expensive stadium. And you can't get it back cheaply. Trust is slow to build and quick to lose, and once a critical mass of people stop assuming the game is straight, no amount of "nobody influences our referees, not even the president" fixes it, because that's the organisation vouching for itself, which is worth nothing.

I should keep two separate things apart here, because they don't carry the same weight. The one that matters for the argument is the officiating: the Egypt goal is the incident with a paper trail, the disallowed goal a national federation actually lodged a formal complaint over, and it's decisions like that, not my mood, that this whole thing should rest on. That's the case, and it stands on its own.

Then there's the personal bit, which I'll keep in its own box because it really is just how I felt. It wasn't the Egypt game, if I'm honest I can barely remember how that one played out. It was the England semi and the final. What I couldn't stand was the manner of it: the relentless cynical fouling, the niggle, the sense that every dark art was worth a go because none of it was ever going to be punished. And that's what worries me most about what comes next, more than any single decision. If the people running the game won't get a grip on it, there's no reason for anyone to stop, and the lesson every other team takes away is that it works. Next time it won't be one side doing it. It'll be half the tournament, because they watched this and learned.

I still watched the final. I'll still watch the next one, same as nine-year-old me went back for Italia 90 without a second thought. That's the annoying part, they know we'll come back. But I watched this one differently, with a little asterisk hanging over the whole thing, and unlike the Hand of God, this asterisk isn't about one man and one moment. It's about everyone in charge, and I don't think it's going away.

The one thing I'll say with no asterisk at all: congratulations to Spain. Just about everyone on the planet who wasn't Argentinian was willing them on by the end, and they had the quality to make the football win in spite of all of it. Thank you for that.

Sources and further reading

I'm asking you to take the governance stuff on trust, so here are the main sources for it, mostly the documented, pre-tournament history that the rest of the argument leans on. Read them and make your own mind up. The 2026 match incidents are still being chewed over in the press, so treat those as reporting rather than settled fact.

• Are Argentina being treated favourably at World Cup?, BBC Sport. The piece that put the question in the mainstream. Worth noting it stops well short of alleging a conspiracy.
• Infantino's FIFA: ten years of power, politics, and so-called ethics, Play the Game. A single overview of the whole governance arc if you only read one.
• FIFA ethics committee overhaul does further damage to credibility, ESPN. The 2017 removal of Borbely and Eckert.
• FIFA applied pressure against Vitaly Mutko council ban, ex-official says, ESPN. Miguel Maduro's account of the Mutko affair.
• FIFA removes word corruption from ethics code and installs defamation clause, Inside The Games. The 2018 code revision: the ten-year time limit, the defamation clause, and the deleted word.
• Swiss prosecutors end criminal proceedings against FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, CNN. The Lauber meetings and how the case ended.