You may be right, but you lose your case the moment you defend it with lies. This is a paradox we witness time and again: a just cause becomes a weakened one simply because it was defended through dishonest means.
What happened after the Egypt–Argentina match was a clear example. From the final whistle onward, social media was flooded with outrage—an outrage that was, to a large extent, understandable and justified. The Egyptian team delivered a performance worthy of respect, and legitimate questions were raised about crucial refereeing decisions, including the delayed intervention of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) and the failure to award Egypt a penalty before Argentina’s winning goal. These are issues that deserve serious discussion and perhaps even a review of the regulations to prevent similar situations in the future.
At the same time, however, another and far more dangerous trend emerged.
Quotes that were never made began circulating. Images were taken out of context. False narratives spread rapidly. The conversation shifted from examining the refereeing decisions to attacking people who had nothing to do with them. Some even went so far as to insult the referee’s mother and blame Lionel Messi for a mistake he neither made nor had any authority over—as though he had been operating the VAR room or making the referee’s decisions.
At that point, the issue ceased to be about a football match. It became an ethical and philosophical question: Is it acceptable to use lies in order to defend what we believe is right?
In my view, the answer is no.
Truth does not need fabrication. In fact, fabrication is often the very thing that weakens the truth.
A lie may succeed in generating sympathy for a few hours, but it also hands the other side the perfect opportunity to avoid discussing the real issue and instead focus on exposing the falsehoods surrounding it. The debate shifts from “Was an injustice committed?” to “Who invented this story?” The original issue is then buried beneath noise that serves no one.
Truth alone is enough—provided we know how to present it.
Unfortunately, our public culture often encourages us to search for someone on whom we can project our anger rather than for the real cause of the problem. An angry mind seeks a face to hate more than it seeks a truth to understand.
That is why the referee becomes a villain, his mother becomes a target of abuse, and Messi is cast as a conspirator in a plot he had no part in creating.
That is not justice.
There is a clear distinction between benefiting from a decision and being responsible for making it.
Argentina benefited from a refereeing decision, but that does not make its players responsible for it. Messi, regardless of his stature, did not hold the whistle, nor was he responsible for the VAR protocol.
To hold a beneficiary accountable simply because they benefited is a form of reasoning that falls short of the very justice we claim to seek.
More importantly, we often struggle to acknowledge a simple truth: reality can be complex.
The Egyptian team played an outstanding match.
At the same time, its coaching staff made mistakes.
And there were refereeing decisions that arguably affected the outcome.
Yet none of this justifies inventing additional injustices that never occurred.
Objectivity does not mean denying our own team’s mistakes, nor does it mean ignoring the injustice it may have suffered. It means being able to hold both truths at the same time without allowing one to erase the other.
This is not merely a sporting issue.
It is a recurring pattern in our political, media, and social life.
How many just causes have lost their strength because some of their defenders exaggerated, fabricated, or spread inaccurate information? How many legitimate positions became objects of ridicule simply because their advocates added claims that were never true?
Not everyone who is passionate about your cause is actually serving it.
Sometimes, the people most devoted to a cause do it the greatest harm when they convince themselves that the end justifies the means.
But truth requires no dishonest methods.
If justice is our goal, we cannot pursue it through injustice.
If truth is our weapon, we must never sheath it in falsehood.
A football match may have inspired these reflections, but it is merely a mirror reflecting a much larger problem.
Nations are judged not only by their ability to defend their rights, but also by the way they choose to defend them.
When we replace evidence with rumor, truth with exaggeration, and justice with revenge, we may earn a moment of applause—and perhaps even a temporary domestic victory—but we lose the most valuable asset any just cause can possess: credibility.
Perhaps, then, the question that should remain with us—in sport as in politics, in the media as in everyday life—is not simply, “Were we right?” It is also, “Did we remain faithful to the truth while defending what was right?”
For truth is not merely a means to achieve justice.
It is its first and most essential condition.
One final question deserves equal attention: Do international sporting institutions themselves consistently uphold the principle we so often invoke—that sport should remain a human endeavor standing above political and ideological conflicts? Or has the world increasingly come to use sport as an instrument of politics when convenient, while speaking of its independence only when it suits its interests?
That, perhaps, is a question worthy of an article of its own.
