Performative Sadness: When Refereeing Controversy Becomes Football's Commodity

There is a moment I always return to, even after watching hundreds of matches: the whistle blows, the referee stands at the centre of the pitch, hand pressed to his earpiece, and tens of thousands of spectators hold their breath waiting for a rectangle drawn on the big screen. In that silence, the match no longer belongs to the players. It belongs to the VAR room.

Last weekend in the Premier League was a big weekend — the familiar phrase used by the English media — with a string of decisions placed under scrutiny. And right at that moment, David Squires, The Guardian's weekly cartoonist, released a strip built around exactly this theme. In the caption, he wrote that the top flight was leading the way in controversial calls and performative sadness.

Reading that line, I paused for a good while. Behind the laughter lies a serious argument about how modern football operates — not about a single match, but about a system.

In Brazil, my second home, there is also a culture of football cartoons. But the focus tends to be on individual players, presidents, managers. What makes the Squires case different is this: the cartoon does not aim at one man. It aims at an entire machine. Referees, players, fans, and even those of us writing like me — everyone is placed in the same frame.

Before going deeper, I must be clear about one thing. I always cross-check the source before I speak. This source is a cartoon, not a data table. It has no expected goals, no pressing metrics, no sideways-pass numbers. Its value lies elsewhere: it is a cultural signal showing that refereeing controversy has become a permanent product of English football.

If you want to understand a league, look at what people mock it for. In Brazil we mock the management scandals and murky contracts; in England they mock the referees and VAR. Both are real fractures in the system.

The Premier League holds an advantage no other league can match: saturation of coverage. Every decision is broadcast, re-analysed, cut into clips, and turned into controversy within hours. That media saturation is both an asset and a burden. It turns a single error into a global event. And when the event repeats often enough, it ceases to be a mistake — it becomes a feature.

What interests me most here is the three-layer structure of the loop.

The first layer is the pitch. A referee makes a decision under incomplete information, under pressure of time and noise. This is a very practical problem, and I know a little about it from coaching: when you only have seconds, you act on trained instinct, not on reasoned deliberation. Every instinct carries an error margin.

The second layer is the VAR room. In theory, technology should reduce errors. In practice, it shifts error from a tolerance range into an absolute range. Once you accept video, spectators expect every decision to be correct. A small error becomes emotionally impossible. Technology does not merely correct mistakes — it creates a new standard it cannot itself meet.

The third layer is the media-and-commerce loop. This is where Squires hits the mark. Controversy is not merely recorded. It is produced, packaged, and sold. One controversial weekend generates an enormous volume of engagement, and that engagement feeds an entire ecosystem: talk shows, podcasts, articles, and cartoons too.

The numbers here are very hard to verify. But I once ran a small test back at Fluminense, cross-referencing 47 matches of data to see what truly predicted success. The lesson I drew: data never tells its own story. It needs context. And the context here is a media industry in which outrage sells better than calm.

I once witnessed something similar. In 2026, in Moscow, I predicted Japan would collapse under Belgium's physical pressure. I was wrong, and I had to watch the tape five times to understand why. What I missed was the gap between the lines — a metric my model could not measure. The model was not wrong. It simply did not yet know how to speak.

The same applies here. The model of referee error is not wrong. But it does not tell the whole story. It overlooks something more important: a system that has been designed to function better because of controversy, not merely in spite of it. If every decision were perfect, no podcast would discuss it. The market does not want perfection. It wants tension.

This is where I want to push back against both sides.

The first side says: referees are the problem, they need reform, they need better technology. That sounds reasonable. But if better technology were deployed, would controversy fall? Experience with semi-automated offside suggests the answer is not as clear as we assume. Every new tool creates a new grey area to argue about.

The second side says: fans and the media are overreacting. Squires's phrase performative sadness is right on this point. But it contradicts itself too: if the sadness is performative, then the cartoon — which lives off that sadness — is also part of the performance. The artist does not stand outside the loop. He earns his living from it.

And here is the point I want to stress: no one stands outside the loop. Referees, clubs, fans, journalists, cartoonists — all are links in the same machine. Blaming one link is the easiest approach, and also the least effective.

For an analyst like me, the biggest lesson here is about humility. The 2026 World Cup taught me that every model needs a humble seat at the table. This cartoon teaches one more thing: so does every analysis of refereeing. Because what we are analysing is not a technical error, but a cultural phenomenon with its own commercial dynamics.

So the question is not how to make referees more correct. The question is: can a system exist in which controversy is no longer the main product? And if not, who truly benefits?

I will follow the coming weekends differently. I will not just count the wrong decisions. I will count how many shows are made, how many articles are published, and how many laughs are sold. That is the real measure of a league leading the way — not in quality, but in its ability to turn sadness into a commodity.