Football’s power plays: VAR, Fifa and the fight for sport’s soul

Leicester’s miracle: a decade on, football’s last pure story

Ten years ago, Claudio Ranieri’s Leicester City pulled off the impossible. A 5000-1 shot, a squad of rejects and journeymen, a season of training-ground laughter and Christmas parties in Copenhagen. Ranieri still laughs when he recalls Riyad Mahrez asking, mid-season, “What do you think we can achieve?” The Italian, ever the pragmatist, knew they could do something special. He just didn’t dare believe it would be the Premier League.

Today, that triumph feels like a relic. Not because it’s faded—quite the opposite. The legend has only grown, a global shorthand for football’s capacity to surprise, to reward the underdog, to remind us why we fell in love with the game in the first place. “People from the US, Canada, Asia—they stop me for photos,” Ranieri says. “Leicester! The legend!” It’s the kind of story that transcends sport, a fairytale that even Hollywood couldn’t script.

But here’s the rub: in 2026, football doesn’t do fairytales anymore. It does VAR controversies, Saudi-backed golf tours, and Fifa handshake stunts. Leicester’s miracle wasn’t just a sporting achievement; it was a cultural moment, a middle finger to the idea that money dictates everything. A decade on, it stands as both an inspiration and a reproach—a reminder of what football used to be, and what it’s become.

Fifa’s handshake farce: when sport becomes geopolitical theatre

Gianni Infantino wanted a photo op. What he got was a masterclass in why football and politics should never mix.

At the Fifa congress in Vancouver, the president summoned the heads of the Palestinian and Israeli football federations to the stage. A symbolic handshake, a gesture of unity, a PR win for a man who’s made a career out of turning sport into spectacle. Instead, Jibril Rajoub, the Palestinian FA president, refused to stand alongside Israel’s Basim Sheikh Suliman. The moment was awkward, cringe-inducing, and—most damningly—entirely predictable.

This wasn’t diplomacy. It was theatre. Infantino, who’s already confirmed he’ll seek a third term as Fifa president next year, has spent years positioning himself as a global statesman, brokering deals and shaking hands in war zones. But sport isn’t a neutral space, and football isn’t a substitute for politics. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t a backdrop for Fifa’s branding exercises; it’s a reality that shapes lives, including those of players and fans. Infantino’s stunt didn’t bridge divides—it exposed how out of touch football’s governing bodies are with the world they claim to represent.

Worse, it underscored Fifa’s hypocrisy. The same organisation that suspended Russia over its invasion of Ukraine now expects Palestinians and Israelis to play nice for a photo. The same body that preaches “football for all” has spent years cosying up to regimes with appalling human rights records. Infantino’s handshake farce wasn’t just tone-deaf; it was a reminder that Fifa’s moral compass is calibrated by whatever serves its image that week.

VAR’s latest farce: when the cure becomes the disease

Nottingham Forest 1-0 Aston Villa. A Europa League semi-final, a first leg, a chance for Unai Emery to prove his tactical genius. Instead, the story of the night was Lucas Digne’s hands in the air, João Pinheiro’s VAR review, and a penalty that never should have been.

Digne’s mistake was naive, not malicious. Omari Hutchinson’s cross was still in play, but the Villa defender instinctively raised his arms, as if surrendering to the inevitable. The referee pointed to the spot. Chris Wood slotted it home. Emery, usually so composed, was furious—not at the decision, but at Elliot Anderson’s escape from a red card earlier in the game. “We didn’t lose our minds,” he said afterwards, a backhanded dig at Forest’s luck.

This is VAR in 2026: a system designed to eliminate errors that now manufactures controversies of its own. The technology was supposed to bring clarity. Instead, it’s created a new layer of confusion, where subjective calls are reviewed by officials who seem just as fallible as the ones on the pitch. Digne’s handball was a split-second reaction, not a deliberate attempt to block the ball. But VAR doesn’t do nuance. It does binary decisions, and in this case, it got it wrong.

The real damage isn’t the result—Forest deserved their lead—but the erosion of trust. Fans no longer see VAR as a tool for fairness; they see it as another cog in football’s relentless march toward sanitisation. The game’s spontaneity, its human flaws, its capacity for drama—all of it is being sacrificed on the altar of “accuracy.” And for what? A system that still can’t decide what a handball is.

What’s left when the magic fades?

Football in 2026 is a paradox. Never has the game been more global, more lucrative, more technologically advanced. And yet, never has it felt more hollow.

Leicester’s triumph was a reminder that football belongs to the people who play it and watch it—not to the suits in boardrooms or the bureaucrats in Zurich. But the suits and bureaucrats are winning. Fifa’s political stunts, VAR’s endless controversies, the Saudi-backed golf tours that siphon talent and attention—all of it points to a sport that’s lost its way.

The question isn’t whether football can be saved. It’s whether it’s worth saving in its current form. The magic isn’t gone—it’s just harder to find. And right now, the people in charge seem more interested in photo ops than in protecting it.