We have reached it. The moment where football punditry has achieved such levels of granular absurdity that we must now convene international committees to determine whether a defender’s pinky finger—the smallest digit on the human hand, evolutionary vestigial in many respects—constitutes handball when a ball happens to pass within a millimeter of it during play.
Benjamin Sesko scored against Liverpool. A perfectly good goal. The kind of finish that, in any rational universe, would be celebrated for approximately ninety seconds before everyone moved on. Instead, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards spent what felt like forty-seven minutes examining whether Sesko’s fingers had technically “brushed” the ball in a way that violated the laws of the game.
Let us pause here. The laws of the game. Not the spirit of the game. Not the intent. Not even the observable reality that a human being cannot retroactively un-brush their fingers from a ball traveling at speed. We are discussing the laws—the same laws that apparently now require a seven-step VAR review process to determine if a fingernail, viewed from four different angles at half-speed, may have made contact with a spherical object.
This is what modern football has become. Not the beautiful game, but the beautifully litigated game. Every goal now arrives with an asterisk, a disclaimer, a seventeen-minute analysis segment where former players point at freeze frames and debate whether the defender’s hand was “in a natural position” or “denying an obvious goal-scoring opportunity” or simply existing in three-dimensional space.
The pundits were serious. Genuinely serious. This was not banter. This was not a bit. They believed—truly believed—that Sesko’s goal should have been ruled out because his fingers may have made contact with the ball. His fingers. Not his arm. Not his hand in the traditional handball sense. His actual fingers, the things you use to tie your shoes or text your mum.
Somewhere in Zurich, FIFA officials are now drafting guidelines. Step one: identify the goal. Step two: locate all visible fingers in the vicinity. Step three: determine if those fingers were in a “suspicious” position. Step four: review in slow motion. Step five: review in reverse slow motion. Step six: ask a forensic physicist if the ball could have been deflected by static electricity alone. Step seven: convene a panel of former defenders to vote on whether they would have done the same thing.
The absurdity is not that VAR exists. Technology in football is necessary. The absurdity is that we have reached a point where the technology is so sophisticated, and the rulebook so baroque, that we can now spend more time analyzing the movement of a single finger than we spend discussing the actual quality of play. Sesko’s movement, his positioning, his finish—these things are secondary. What matters is whether his pinky was technically culpable.
This is the logical endpoint of perfectionism. We wanted VAR to eliminate clear errors. Instead, we have created a system where there are no clear errors, only increasingly subtle ones that require exponential levels of scrutiny to identify. A goal is no longer good or bad. A goal is now a hypothesis that must be tested against a rulebook written by people who have never played football at professional level and are apparently working from a dictionary definition of handball that includes “any movement of the hand or fingers in the general direction of a ball.”
The truly maddening part? Shearer and Richards are not wrong about the rules. They are citing the actual laws of the game. The rules genuinely are this absurd. A handball offense now includes scenarios so marginal that they require technological intervention to identify. We have legislated ourselves into a corner where the only way to enforce the rules is to have referees watching replays for longer than the actual match.
Football used to be simple. You kicked the ball. The ball went in the net. You celebrated. Now you celebrate, then you wait. You wait for the review. You wait for the analysis. You wait for the pundits to dissect your pinky finger on live television. You wait for FIFA to issue a statement clarifying whether your specific finger movement falls under Article 12, Subsection 3.2b of the handball guidelines.
Sesko’s goal stood. The system worked, technically. But something is broken when we must spend this much energy discussing something this trivial. The game has become not football, but a perpetual court case where every decision is subject to appeal, every frame is evidence, and every finger is potentially guilty until proven innocent.
Next week, somewhere, another goal will be scored. Another finger will brush a ball. Another panel of pundits will convene. Another seven-step process will begin. And we will have learned nothing, because the problem was never the technology. The problem was that we asked the technology to solve a problem—human error—by creating a system so complex that it generates new problems faster than it solves old ones.
But at least Shearer got to use the phrase “under the laws of the game.” That is something.