After yesterday’s shock of the match between Portugal and Croatia, I needed some time to set my emotions aside and think about the final minutes. VAR technology detected that Matanović had touched the ball with his head, offside was called, and our goal for 2:2 was disallowed.

As the pressure on referees keeps growing, technology has been introduced into more or less every sport where millimetres matter. Unfortunately, that technology and its algorithms can completely overshadow what we all actually see. Yes - if the technology says the ball was touched, there is nothing more to discuss about that particular case. What I do want to discuss is the impact of technology on people.

The officiating we have now is hybrid. Technology is there primarily to help the head referee with decisions he couldn’t see. But if a referee knows that VAR can step in every time, we run into automation complacency - the tendency to lower your own attention and double-checking because you trust the system to do the job for you. It is closely related to automation bias, where a person places excessive trust in the technology’s suggestions and stops critically questioning the outcome or looking for additional information.

The second way of officiating is to remove technology entirely. The referee would then have to be maximally focused, knowing his career depends on his calls. But here’s what comes naturally to us: if a referee makes a mistake in that kind of system, after a while we, as people, will say, “Yes, he got it wrong, that’s human” - and everything will be fine.

The third way is to remove the human factor completely and let the technology itself judge every illegal touch, foul, and offside. Then we can say: fine, the algorithm has done its part, it is the referee now, and we simply have to accept it.

But when we have the hybrid model, people will never accept the technology as it is, because they still expect the referee to take responsibility, to see the bigger picture, rather than blindly trust the technology he’s using. And that is where the confusion, anger, and frustration come from - all the feelings yesterday’s match left us with. The referee becomes a lightning rod for a decision he didn’t actually make - he absorbs the anger for something the system determined.

Sadly, we will never go back to purely human officiating. Cameras now show every mistake to millions of viewers in a single second, and the commercial pressure is too great for anyone to give up the technology that “corrects” the referee. The only solution I see is to commit to technology fully and accept it as the final judge.

And here I have to be honest: I’m not advocating full automation because it’s infallible. The technology has its own margins of error and false positives. I advocate for it because it is consistent and because it clearly assigns responsibility. The problem with the hybrid system isn’t only about who makes the mistake, but about the mismatch between our expectations and reality: we expect human judgement, and we get an algorithmic one. When the algorithm openly becomes the referee, at least we know where we stand.

In tennis, almost every tournament is automated (Roland Garros is not), and in my view it works. That said, I have to be fair: a tennis line is pure geometry - the ball is either in or out. Football has far more decisions that are a matter of interpretation rather than measurement (intent on handball, interference from an offside position), so the tennis solution can’t be mapped over one-to-one. But the direction is the same: fewer grey zones, and less room for the feeling of being cheated.

What I feel most sorry about is the team and the people, because I know how much time and effort it takes to become even an average athlete, let alone a top one like our national team players. At this level, these things aren’t fair to everyone who lives this sport.