If you’re transgender, you can die for our country — but you cannot receive life-saving health care, access it for your transgender family members, or expect your family to be treated equally in schools run by the armed forces, should a new provision in the House NDAA become law. This appears to be the politic of Democratic Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, of Texas…
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For many around the US and around the world, the World Cup was a welcome distraction from the dismal state of the world and the daily overwhelm of relentless war, corruption, fascism, and disaster. But the games were also an uncomfortable reminder that, no matter how much we love sports and want them to be an escape from politics and the pain of living in a broken society, there is no way to truly escape those things, and the manufactured illusion that sports are an escape from political reality is just that: an illusion.
At a live event hosted on July 16, 2026, at Chilo’s bar in New York City, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez spoke with legendary sportswriters Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff about what it means to love sports in an age of authoritarians.
Additional links/info:
Chilo’s bar website and Instagram
Jules Boykoff, OR Books, Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine
Dave Zirin, Penguin Randomhouse, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn
Credits:
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome back to the Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. The 2026 World Cup is now officially over after Spain defeated Argentina in the final match on Sunday. And for many of us around the US and around the world, the World Cup was a very welcome distraction from the ambient awfulness and doom and the daily delugion overwhelm of relentless war, corruption, fascism and disaster. But the games were also an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how much we love sports and the global spectacle of the
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The quarterfinals of the FIFA Men’s World Cup are underway. And the tournament’s most consequential actor has not been a star player, like Argentina’s Lionel Messi, or even President Donald Trump. No, the most important figure has been the post of video assistant referee, or VAR.
The premise is simple: Should the referee on the field make a “clear and obvious error,” or if there is a “serious missed incident,” another referee sitting off-site in a room with myriad camera feeds can help the in-stadium ref review and correct the mistake.
Nowadays, nearly every burst of joy from a goal is tempered for several minutes by a lengthy wait, either for referees to decide whether they will review it or by the review itself.
It’s a great idea on paper. But the perfect has become the enemy of the good. Instead, even as VAR has been increasingly used in soccer over the past decade, it has become a byword for long reviews and questionable officiating. And its use at this World Cup has felt arbitrary, at best a minimal improvement over human judgment.
At least three dramatic moments in this tournament were altered by VAR.
Croatia’s dramatic last-second equalizer in its round of 32 match against Portugal was called back after VAR used sound-wave technology inside the ball to decide that the goal scorer was offside due to a nearly invisible touch of the ball from a teammate.
The day before, in the round of 32 game between the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina, VAR’s input led to the on-field referee showing U.S. player Folarin Balogun a red card, resulting in an automatic ban. The fallout was