UEFA has quietly ruled out one of the more divisive VAR experiments to come out of the 2026 World Cup, instructing its video assistant referees not to use the tournament's expanded "mistaken identity" protocol to overturn diving or simulation decisions, Sport5 reports.
The rule itself was an IFAB creation, widened before the World Cup to let VAR intervene whenever the referee appeared to have carded the wrong player for an offence. In theory it was meant to fix simple confusion cases — a booking pinned on the wrong shirt number in a crowded box.
In practice, it produced the most talked-about refereeing moment of the tournament. In Argentina's 3-1 extra-time quarter-final win over Switzerland on July 11, Portuguese referee João Pinheiro initially booked Argentina's Leandro Paredes for a foul on Breel Embolo. VAR sent him back to the monitor, ruled that Embolo had in fact dived, scrubbed Paredes' yellow card and booked Embolo instead — his second of the match, and an automatic red in the 72nd minute.
It was the first sending-off of its kind in World Cup history: a VAR intervention that flipped a card from the player originally penalised to the player originally fouled. Argentina, level at 1-1 through Alejandro Garnacho...
Argentina, pegged back to 1-1 by Dan Ndoye's finish after Alexis Mac Allister's opener, took full advantage of the extra man. Julián Álvarez broke the deadlock in extra time and Lautaro Martínez added a late second, sending Argentina through to a semi-final against England while Switzerland went home fuming.
Swiss coach Murat Yakin did not hide his anger afterwards, telling reporters, in comments carried by Ynet, that the rule "has no connection to football, in my opinion." The Embolo decision became a rallying point for critics who argued VAR had drifted from correcting factual errors into second-guessing a referee's judgment calls.
According to the reports now emerging, UEFA has drawn the same line internally. The governing body has told its VAR teams that "mistaken identity" should apply only to clear-cut identification errors — cases where the referee has quite simply carded the wrong individual — and not to situations where the underlying question is whether a foul, dive or simulation happened at all.
That distinction effectively shelves the World Cup version of the rule for Champions League and Europa League matches this season. UEFA's view, as relayed by Sportskeeda and Yahoo Sports, is that letting VAR relitigate a subjective call like simulation under the identity-error banner risked expanding video review's reach further into referees' on-field judgment than the body is comfortable with.
It leaves an unusual split heading into the new European season: a VAR tool trialled on football's biggest stage, credited by IFAB as a fix for a genuine blind spot, will not travel intact into the continent's leading club competitions — at least not yet, and not for the type of incident that made it famous.
