Bergomi with the club after the penalty not awarded to Frattesi: who was he angry with?

In the studies of Sky Calcio Club, the contact in the area between Giorgio Scalvini and Davide Frattesi not only reignited the VAR process: it sparked a heated debate among pundits. In front of the images from the match on March 15, 2026, the technical analysis quickly turned into a fierce controversy against the shifting narratives of those who report and judge football on television.

Beppe Bergomi did not mince words, pointing the finger at the inconsistency of many insiders, including studio colleagues. The former Inter captain denounced how the interpretations of those who broadcast on TV change with the wind: "There are those who say one thing today and said another two years ago," he thundered live, emphasizing how the “wobbly” evaluation metrics do not only concern the refereeing body but also contaminate the TV studios. The "Uncle" does not name anyone but it seems clear that he was referring to Luca Marelli, the Dazn refereeing expert. 

Particularly in the crosshairs is the lexicon adopted in the comments. Labeling Scalvini's intervention on Frattesi as a “soft penalty” was deemed by Bergomi misleading and dangerous. The dynamics, in his opinion, are clear: Frattesi gets to the ball first and Scalvini, in an attempt to clear, makes contact with the opponent's foot.

Supporting him was Paolo Di Canio, who urged an end to the television sophistry and the excuses related to the defender's movement inertia. The former striker dismissed the rhetoric of the “soft penalty” with a peremptory provocation: "If you take away the lines of the area, they call a foul 10 times out of 10".

For months, in football talk shows and programs like Open VAR, there has been a call for a “high threshold” to reduce whistles on minimal contacts and restore centrality to the referee. But, as Bergomi and Di Canio observe, when this approach is applied without a coherent pedagogy and defended on TV with shifting arguments, the system short-circuits.

The inertia of VAR in the face of an obvious error fuels the suspicion that the use of technology fluctuates based on the background noise, often amplified precisely by the inconsistency of those commenting.