VAR time limits, tournament expansion, and more were the topics tackled ahead of Friday’s FIFA World Cup draw

WASHINGTON — Whether fans like video reviews in soccer or not, they tend to draw complaints when those reviews seem to take too long.

It might seem natural to want a time limit for those reviews, perhaps one or two minutes. The sport’s global governing body is saying no, though, at least for now.

“Well, there might be different opinions, which I will respect,” FIFA’s refereeing chief Pierluigi Collina said Thursday at a media briefing ahead of Friday’s 2026 men’s World Cup draw. “Certainly, when something lasts a bit longer, it’s not because the referee is, say, lazy or slow. Probably, things which are considered are particularly complicated.’”

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A game referee from 1995 to 2005, including the 2002 men’s World Cup final, Collina took his new role with FIFA in 2017 and has remained a public figure ever since.

“Something else to consider is when you are waiting for someone, every second looks like an eternity — when you are under pressure and you are doing something, time flies,” he said. “So, referees, when they are doing that, probably they do not really realize that time is passing for them so quickly. But, we all know that timing is an issue in every activity, so we are always trying to improve.”

Collina acknowledged a report by the Times of London earlier this week that the International Football Association Board — the entity that sets the rules of how soccer is played — is considering expanding what VAR is allowed to rule on.

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The expansion would include second yellow cards, which result in red cards and expulsion; and whether officials got it right calling a corner kick vs. a goal kick.

“It was already announced after a meeting of the IFAB football and technical advisory panel: the discussion took place, and the outcome was to propose to further discuss and propose” at the IFAB’s next business meeting on Jan. 20, Collina said. If a proposal passes there, it will go to the annual general meeting in March. That vote would be for implementation on June 1, in time for the World Cup.

“Certainly, extending the possibility of the VAR to intervene in some specific circumstances is something [on] the table,” Collina said, adding: “It would be a pity if the result of the competition, whichever the competition is, is decided not by what the players do on the field playing, but by a honest mistake made by the decision-maker.”

Specific to corner kicks calls, he said “that the main criteria is no delay” in the action on the field.

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“It takes normally, how long? 10, 15 seconds to get the attackers ready to take the corner kick,” Collina said. “In these 10-15 seconds, if the corner kick was wrongly given, everybody has the evidence that the start of play is wrong. To me, it’s difficult to understand if they have the possibility to see that, why we have to hide our head under the sand and hope that nothing happened on the corner kick which is taken.”

Collina also said that FIFA hopes to use referee bodycams again next summer, after debuting them in the Club World Cup.

“It was, I would say, a great success,” he said. “It has been implemented in some leagues, [which] means that it was well-received by the TV viewers — also, referees got some benefit from using that. So, pretty confident that the rule-maker, as mentioned, IFAB, will give us the permission to to implement it during the next World Cup [in] ’26.”

It was no surprise to hear FIFA officials say Thursday that it’s a good thing to expand the men’s World Cup to 48 teams, as will happen for the first time next year. The women’s tournament will follow suit in 2031 when the U.S. spearheads a regional tournament alongside Mexico, Costa Rica, and Jamaica.

But the way those officials framed it nonetheless was news, especially for the international media outlets that have traveled to D.C. this week.

“It’s less than 25% of the 211 countries who are affiliated to FIFA,” said Arsène Wenger, FIFA’s chief of global football development and the famed former manager of English Premier League club Arsenal. “Still, 75% of the teams are not there, and I count in there China, India — that’s 3 billion people.”

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FIFA’s chief football officer Jill Ellis, the former U.S. women’s national team manager, noted how the growth of women’s soccer worldwide has made it easier to have a 48-team tournament without fear of lopsided games.

“We see it in the in the college basketball landscape right here in the U.S.,” said the coach who led the U.S. women to World Cup titles in 2015 and 2019. “We’re used to these teams that are maybe lower-ranked and then they suddenly have this phenomenal run.”

The hot temperatures at this summer’s Club World Cup understandably raised a lot of complaints, and fears of more problems next summer. Wenger raised that unprompted.

FIFA hasn’t said much yet about if it will take weather into consideration for kickoff times, beyond one hint from president Gianni Infantino in July that it would be a good idea.

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“If there’s one uncertainty that we don’t master, it’s the weather,” Wenger said. “Especially in Miami, you know, places like Atlanta, where you had some problems last year. So we’ll do the maximum to protect the competition and the players.”

He also said “we will consider a lot the best possibilities for the teams to be protected from heat” as FIFA finalizes the kickoff times before Saturday’s announcement. But skeptical fans worldwide won’t believe that until they see it.