Carranza's Hand, the Controversial Penalty and Liga MX's VAR Credibility Problem

“Touch.”

The ball leaves Julián Carranza's foot inside the box. A fraction of a second later, the ball deflects and strikes his elbow just as the centre-back spins to clear it out of the danger zone. No one on the pitch spots it. Referee Guillermo Pacheco Larios lets play continue; Necaxa's white shirts keep pushing forward, still believing the game is under control. Only the VAR team, in a closed room kilometres from the stadium, sees the touch. Three minutes later, Pacheco Larios stands by the monitor, slows the replay, and nods. Penalty. América of Guillermo Almada are awarded an equaliser in first-half stoppage time. Necaxa leave the contest feeling that two points have just been taken away, and one word begins to burn across Mexican social media: “robo”.

One could classify this as an ordinary controversial refereeing decision, but I believe it exposes a much deeper crack — the crack in the entire match-supervision system that Liga MX operates.

The match belonged to Jornada 10 of the Apertura 2026 season. América, one of the biggest brands in Mexican football, were trailing Necaxa and needed a goal. The sequence began with a free kick in favour of Guillermo Almada's side. The ball was sent deep into the box; Carranza received it with his back to goal, forced to clear in a narrow space. The ball struck his arm. The on-field referee did not whistle; the game continued for a few seconds before the VAR team, with assistant referee Camacho Peregrina, spoke up. After being advised, Pacheco Larios reviewed the screen himself and awarded the penalty. Almada's side equalised just before half-time. The match also closed the round, meaning the public had full time to debate before a new round began. The available data does not state the league positions of the two teams at the time, so I will not rush to conclude how much these two dropped points affect the Liguilla race.

Immediately after the match, Francisco Chacón — a former referee and now one of the most influential television analysts — attacked the decision on social media. Chacón declared that “nobody, absolutely nobody, had seen or claimed anything”, and that the VAR system “invents and looks for a handball”. He also mentioned a possible personal link between Camacho Peregrina and Elizondo's padel club, a detail suggestive of insinuation rather than evidence. These statements turned a single refereeing decision into a battle over the credibility of Liga MX's entire officiating process.

The first thing to clarify: not every ball-to-arm contact is an offence under IFAB Law 12. The casual viewer sees the ball hit Carranza's arm in slow motion and assumes the penalty is obvious; football's laws do not work that way. The referee must identify one of two criteria: a deliberate handball, or an arm position that makes the body unnaturally bigger. After watching the replay, Pacheco Larios judged that Carranza's arm was in an unnatural position — away from the body's axis, extending the contact surface beyond what a clearance required. Structurally, that judgement can stand. But Chacón does not dispute the contact; he disputes the deeper layer, arguing there was no deliberation in this situation and that the arm position was simply part of a natural turning movement.

The controversy has two layers, and pundits usually mix them. The first is the legal threshold: did Carranza's arm make his body unnaturally bigger enough to constitute an offence? The second is the VAR intervention threshold: was the on-field miss a clear and obvious error serious enough to force intervention? The IFAB protocol is clear on this point: VAR must not re-referee the match, and must not enter subjective marginal calls that belong to the referee. Chacón attacks exactly this second layer. When no one on the pitch saw anything, when the referee in the best position let it go, the situation did not meet the threshold for VAR to impose a debatable penalty — that is his argument, and as a matter of protocol it is not without foundation.

Based on my experience watching matches over many decades, I have noticed a recurring paradox: VAR was created to reduce controversy, but in boundary situations like Jornada 10 it produces more controversy. The cause is not technology; it is the process of accountability. The Japanese are not strong because of discipline; they are strong because they understand the reason to be disciplined; a trustworthy refereeing team is the same. The “soft discipline” of an officiating system means understanding why a match must be stopped, why a marginal case should be ignored, and — most importantly — why the reasons for intervention must be made public. When supporters cannot hear the exchange between the referee and the video assistant, when all trust rests on a screen whose content the stadium cannot see, the system puts itself in a weak position.

The “robo” story goes far beyond one incident. It is a story about the asymmetry of information between those who make a decision and those who suffer it. A decision correct in law can still be judged wrong in the court of public opinion without explanation; a decision wrong in law becomes fuel for every conspiracy narrative. Referee Pacheco Larios and VAR official Camacho Peregrina must explain a penalty, but what they carry does not stop there: they must defend the legitimacy of the entire process. The media pressure on officiating teams for a mid-tier match like this one is unmatched — not because the game was more important than others, but because a controversial penalty image travels several times farther than an ordinary winning goal.

Pressure is higher because the beneficiary is América. I have followed Latin American football long enough to recognise a law: the media weight of a big club is never neutral. A favourable decision for América is scrutinised under a microscope; a similar decision for Necaxa passes in relative silence. I am not alleging deliberate bias; I am describing the structure of the media market, where public perception is shaped by the historical asymmetry between a big brand and a small brand. When a former referee like Chacón steps forward to criticise, he carries the credibility of someone who was once inside the system, making the big-club favouritism story heavier than any legal analysis I could write.

Position is only the starting point; the system decides the destination. In this case, the position of Carranza's arm is only the starting point of the debate; the destination lies in the system — the VAR protocol, the intervention threshold, and the transparency policy of Liga MX and FMF. The officiating team is placed on the scales not because of a single judgement, but because of the entire way they account for that judgement in public. The stage-1 match data contains no possession, xG or pressing figures for the two sides; this is purely a refereeing incident, and it must be assessed in the language of law and procedure, not the language of spreadsheets.

Amid the noisy debate, a technical detail has been almost entirely ignored. Chacón suggested that the situation, in his view, “is more a foul by Henry for dangerous play than a penalty”. If before the ball struck Carranza's arm, Henry — an América player — committed a dangerous-play offence in the sequence leading to the free kick, then the penalty cannot stand, because the attacking team's offence happened first and must be dealt with first. Henry's identity and club are not confirmed in the available data, and I lack the facts to confirm anything. But the mere existence of such a hypothesis reveals a classic blind spot of modern football: VAR tends to focus on the final moment, on the point of the arm contact, while ignoring the entire sequence before. If an attacking-team offence took place earlier, the entire ruling collapses — not because of Carranza's arm, but because the system looked at the wrong point.

The second counter-intuitive angle may be harder to hear: Pacheco Larios can be legally right while the whole process remains wrong on transparency. A correct decision without explanation feeds the “robo” story exactly like a wrong one. In an era of slow-motion cameras, VAR graphics and control-room audio, the public no longer accepts an important call passing without explanation. Liga MX and FMF's silence after Jornada 10 may be procedurally cautious, but in a high-speed media context, silence is read as concealment. One strong former referee voice points a finger, the system stays silent, and in that gap, the “robo” story grows along the lines most convenient for those willing to believe a conspiracy.

There is no need to wait for the referees' committee's final verdict to measure the system's response. The data will speak: when Liga MX and FMF publish the referee list for the next round, when they decide to release the VAR room audio or keep it sealed, when they assign Pacheco Larios and Camacho Peregrina to big matches again or push them into the shadows of lesser football. I do not predict; I read the evidence before the current shifts. The real question of Jornada 10 is not whether Carranza committed a foul; the question is whether a league has the courage to trust its own system, the courage to release the audio before the public and accept every consequence. When the audio is opened, the truth — whatever it is — will have ground to stand on. When it is not, the “robo” story will keep itself alive, regardless of any committee's final word.