Some tournament numbers tell you who is winning. Others tell you who is getting the better of the margins. In this World Cup, the VAR data is starting to look like the second kind of story, and Lionel Messi Argentina World Cup attention is part of why Argentina’s name sits at the center of it.
So far this year, there have been 35 VAR interventions across 97 World Cup games. That total already exceeds the 22 VAR interventions recorded in 2018 and the 26 in 2022, which is a reminder that the system is not just present in the tournament — it is shaping it more often than in previous editions.
Argentina and Mexico lead the favorable-call count
The clearest team-level pattern is that Argentina and Mexico have each received four VAR interventions in their favor. On the other side of the ledger, Paraguay and Croatia have each had three decisions go against them. Those totals do not, by themselves, prove anything sinister. But they do show that some teams are getting more of the decisive breaks than others.
That is especially relevant after earlier this week, when Argentina beat Egypt 3-2 after a referee disallowed an Egyptian goal following a VAR review. Matches like that are exactly why the topic matters: one intervention can change the shape of a game, the mood around a team and, in a knockout-style tournament, the path forward.
Brennan Klein, the director of the Northeastern NetSI Sport research group, is careful not to overstate what the data can say. The numbers, he explained, do not definitively prove referee bias. In his view, the dataset records the event itself — the foul, the minute, the player and the location on the pitch — rather than a simple verdict on intent. As he put it, “It might be easy to see with your eyes, ‘Oh God, that was a bad call,’ but the data that I see just says the foul occurred in this minute by this player at this X, Y coordinate on the pitch.”
That caution matters. There is a big jump from noticing that a team has benefited from favorable reviews to claiming the referees are biased for or against anyone. Klein said “there are ways to poke at it,” but also warned that “there’s a hop, step and a jump away from: ‘They’re biased against my team or for this team.’”
In other words, the pattern is real, but the conclusion is not automatic. VAR is producing more interventions than it did in 2018 or 2022, and Argentina and Mexico are at the top of the favorable list so far. What the data can do is show the scale of the effect. What it cannot do is fully explain motive.
That is still enough to make the tournament story sharper. For Argentina, and for any team hoping to survive the pressure of a World Cup run, the margins can be just as important as the main event. The numbers suggest that this year’s World Cup is being shaped by those margins more often than before — and Lionel Messi Argentina World Cup headlines are now living inside that reality.
