VAR will continue to punish divers at the 2026 World Cup if they get away with simulation – but only if the tackler is incorrectly booked.
It follows an incident in the USA’s first game of the tournament against Paraguay in Los Angeles on Friday which caused some confusion inside the SoFi Stadium.
Paraguayan winger Miguel Almiron was dribbling towards the penalty area when he went down under pressure from US captain Tim Ream. The Dutch referee, Danny Makkelie, awarded Paraguay a free-kick and showed a yellow card to Ream.
Ream was incredulous and protested against the decision. Replays showed he had not touched Almiron, who had thrown himself to the floor to trick the referee.
The game continued with a Paraguay free-kick but was stopped moments later, mid-flow, with messages on the giant screen displaying: “VAR review, mistaken identity.”
Referee Makkelie was directed to the pitchside monitor where he quickly realised his error in penalising Ream. He reversed the decision, rescinding Ream’s yellow card and booking Almiron instead.
VAR interventions are not allowed for the express purpose of reviewing and correcting yellow cards, because that would mean too many interventions and break the flow of the game.
VAR can only overturn a yellow card after moments involving goals, penalties, red cards and cases of mistaken identity. The mistaken identity rule was introduced for incidents like the sending off of Arsenal defender Kieran Gibbs in a Premier League game in 2014, when Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain was the culprit of the offence.
The laws of the game state mistaken identity can be only be applied to red or yellow cards when “the referee penalises an offence but has clearly misidentified the player”.
Almiron’s yellow card was issued under the umbrella of mistaken identity, even though the referee had not “misidentified” Ream but had simply made an error in his interpretation of the incident.
The Independent could not find evidence of VAR being previously used in this way to overturn incidents of simulation.
But it is understood that Fifa is happy with how its officials handled the scenario, and there could be more occasions during the World Cup when divers are retrospectively punished. Fifa’s only gripe was that after Almiron was correctly booked, the game should have restarted from a drop ball – as is procedure when a game is stopped mid-flow – instead of a US free-kick.
However, that comes with the caveat that VAR would only step in to review an incident if a card was issued. If Ream had not been booked, there would have been no grounds under Fifa rules for VAR to conduct a review.
