World Cup Snicko controversy shows sports games are now less high-tech than the sports they simulate

13 minutes into injury time of the FIFA World Cup’s Round of 32 knockout game between Portugal and Croatia, Manchester City defender Josko Gvardiol arrived in the box to equalize, making the game 2-2 and sending Ronaldo and Modric – the two old stagers of this tournament, into extra time.

Football, however, is not football as we once knew it, though. The soccerification continues apace. We have Hydration Breaks that conveniently split the game into four quarters, in-game graphics to show players’ positions, we have semi-automated offside technology filtering Assistant referees down to people who just run a 10K in a straight line back and forward for 96 minutes, and we have VAR.

The technology to run a game that kids play with no problem in a park is mind-boggling, and whether you think VAR is sucking the moments of joy that made the game out of it, like a Proton pack in Ghostbusters gobbles up Slimer or whether you believe every decision should be verified by a computer, there can be no doubting now that video game versions of the sport they replicate, are actually less high-tech than the real thing.

Step forward the latest technology to be weaponized against a goal-scorer. Gvardiol was to see his, and possibly the best moment of the World Cup to date, be ruled out by what is being called Snicko technology, although that’s not totally accurate, as Snicko is based on microphones picking up ball on bat noises caused by, you guessed it, snicks.

First, let’s look at what happened. As the ball is crossed into the box, it appears to fly over Croatian Igor Matanovic before eventually being bundled into the goal by Gvardiol. Had Matanovic touched the ball, the goal would be offside but it didn’t look like it deviated, changed direction or spin. Step forward VAR and its new toy.

You see, each ball at the World Cup has an embedded microchip that registers touch and motion, enabling stats such as shot speed and power to be recorded. It also measured a touch from Matanovic, picked up by VAR and therefore ruling the vital score for Croatia out and sending them home. Fate is a cruel mistress indeed.

Now the tech is amazing. I don’t know how accurate it is, how many times it has been tested in these unique, edge-case scenarios that the people behind it are confident there was a touch, but once the tech shows it, the goal has to be chalked off, and the joy eradicated from the game. Margin calls. I doubt there are many football fans globally who don’t think VAR has gone too far and that the technology creep in, what is fundamentally a really simple game, is out of control.

Croatia boss Zlatko Dalic made his views clear after the game saying, “I will not comment much about it but I will say the refereeing was very bad. VAR kills emotions; it kills everything within you. We have gone too far with VAR.”.

Will Snicko be in EA FC27?

But this is also going to have to affect the games we play, too. Are we going to see Snicko in EA FC27? Will we finally get VAR – it’s such a huge part of the real game now. Of course, all we could really get is an approximation, included to make the game seem more realistic. A Faux VAR, if you will. How happy would you be to see one of your wonder goals against xDragonShagger69x get ruled off because of a fake Snicko meter in the build-up? What price realism?

If we want our football games to be realistic, we are going to need the devs to pretend all this stuff is, as EA Sports is fond of saying, in the game.

The funny thing is that sports games may now be less dramatic than the sports they are simulating. EA FC already has access to perfect information, so it quietly resolves most decisions in an instant. Real football, by contrast, has become this strange hybrid of sport, broadcast package and forensic investigation, where goals are no longer goals until the ball sensor, the offside model and the VAR room have all had their say. In that sense, the next step for EA FC might not be better grass or shinier boots, but better nonsense and theater.

Croatia’s exit also raises a bigger design question for sports games: should realism always mean accuracy, or should it mean frustration as well? Because actual football is no longer just about what happened on the pitch. It is about how long it takes to confirm what happened, who explains it, how the crowd reacts, and whether anyone in the stadium believes the graphic they are being shown. If EA FC 27 wants to feel like football in 2027, maybe it needs to stop being so clean.

The most video game thing about the whole controversy is that the call came down to something fans could barely perceive. It was football’s version of a hitbox argument: the player swears nothing touched him, the screen says otherwise, and somewhere inside the machine a tiny invisible collision has changed the outcome. Croatia thought they had forced extra time; the system saw a touch event, recalculated the phase, and wiped the moment from the match and Croatia from the comp. Madness.

Authored by Paul McNally

Paul McNally has been around consoles and computers since his parents bought him a Mattel Intellivision in 1980. He has been a prominent games journalist since the 1990s, spending over a decade as editor of popular print-based video games and computer magazines, including a market-leading PlayStation title. Paul has written high-end gaming content for GamePro, Official Australian PlayStation Magazine, PlayStation Pro, Amiga Action, Mega Action, ST Action, GQ, Loaded, and the The Mirror. He has also hosted panels at retro-gaming conventions and can regularly be found guesting on gaming podcasts and Twitch shows. Believing that the reader deserves actually to enjoy what they are reading is a big part of Paul’s ethos when it comes to gaming journalism, elevating the sites he works on above the norm.

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