Colombia’s Davinson Sanchez goal ruled out by VAR for offside against Portugal

Football has a long history of heartbreaking moments. But few are quite as modern, or as maddening, as watching a goal celebration die in slow motion on a video replay screen.

That is exactly what happened to Colombia when Davinson Sanchez put the ball in the net against Portugal, only for VAR to rule it out for offside. The margin, according to reports circulating on social media, came down to something in the neighborhood of a toenail.

What happened

Sanchez, Colombia’s experienced central defender, managed to get on the end of what appeared to be a late winning opportunity against Portugal in a match played between June 24 and 27, 2026.

The technology determined that Sanchez was offside by what observers described as an impossibly tight margin. The phrase making the rounds: a “toe too far.”

VAR drew its lines, found a sliver of Sanchez’s body ahead of the last defender, and ruled the goal out. The celebration stopped. The scoreline did not change.

The reaction, predictably, was loud. Social media filled quickly with a mixture of disbelief, dark humor, and the kind of frustration that only football can produce in quite this quantity.

Why VAR keeps ending up here

VAR was supposed to fix football’s most obvious injustices. The clear and obvious errors. The ghost goals. The handball that only three people in the stadium saw.

What it was not supposed to do, at least in the minds of most fans when it was introduced, was rule out goals based on margins invisible to the human eye.

Semi-automated offside technology is precise in a way that the game was never designed to accommodate. The offside rule was written with human referees in mind, human eyes tracking human bodies in real time. Now, the technology can detect a shoulder, an armpit, a toe. And it does. Consistently. Without sentiment.

Sanchez built his reputation in the Premier League with Tottenham Hotspur before moving to Galatasaray, where he has continued to perform at a high level.

What this means going forward

An offside call that is technically correct by three centimeters but visually indistinguishable from onside does not feel like justice to the team whose goal was taken away.

Some proposals have floated the idea of a “daylight” standard, where a player would need to be clearly and visibly ahead of the defender for offside to be called. Others have suggested a margin of error buffer. None of those changes are in place yet.

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