I’m a huge basketball fan. I grew up watching the NBA, arguing about players who retired before I was born, and wasting hours on a no-look pass nobody had asked for. But if basketball is a passion, soccer is something deeper.
I have supported Manchester United since I was old enough to go to the bathroom unsupervised. My father, meanwhile, is a diehard Liverpool supporter. Growing up, our house was less a home and more a demilitarized zone. United against Liverpool was the closest my family came to civil war. If United won, I floated around the house for days. If Liverpool won, my father suddenly became the world’s most insufferable human being.
That rivalry taught me why soccer is special. Half the beauty of soccer is the madness. The missed chances. The terrible refereeing decisions. The goalkeeper who slips at the worst possible moment. The defender who accidentally turns a routine clearance into an own goal.
Perhaps when it’s too late, you realize perfection is often sterile.
Human error is a part of the beautiful game.
For most of soccer’s history, fans accepted that referees would occasionally get things wrong. Sometimes those mistakes hurt. Sometimes they helped. Sometimes they became legendary stories repeated decades later in pubs, living rooms, and stadium parking lots. Then came VAR.
From helper to master
For anyone unfamiliar, VAR stands for video assistant referee. In simple terms, it is soccer’s version of instant replay on AI-infused steroids. A team of officials watches the game through cameras and can tell the referee to stop play and review decisions involving goals, penalties, red cards, and offside calls.
The idea sounds reasonable enough. Use technology to make the game fairer.
The reality has been something rather different.
A striker scores. The crowd erupts. Fans hug strangers. Drinks fly through the air. Somewhere, a man loses his glasses and another loses his mind. Then everyone waits. And waits. And waits.
A group of officials in a room filled with screens begin examining freeze-frames as if they were analyzing evidence from a murder investigation. Lines appear on the screen. Angles are checked. Pixels are interrogated. The striker’s left nostril may have wandered two millimeters beyond the last defender.
Two minutes later, the goal is disallowed. The stadium goes silent. What was once one of the most emotional moments in sports now comes with a mandatory waiting period. Every goal feels like it must survive an IRS audit before it can officially exist. VAR arrived to correct errors and corrected the joy out of the game instead.
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L-R: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Timothy Hurst/MediaNews Group/Denver Post/Getty Images
The suspense is gone. The spontaneity is gone. Fans now celebrate goals with the enthusiasm of someone waiting for a bank transfer to clear. Nobody knows whether they should cheer immediately or wait for the algorithmic overlords in the replay bunker to issue a ruling.
And now something similar may be coming to basketball.
Like clockwork
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recently discussed plans to use AI-powered camera systems to automatically make certain officiating decisions, particularly objective calls like out-of-bounds plays. Cameras would surround the court, instantly determining who touched the ball last.
Many will argue that this will eliminate mistakes. Maybe. But sports are rarely damaged by too much humanity. If anything, they are usually damaged by too little. The danger isn’t that AI gets calls wrong, but that it gradually turns the game into a laboratory experiment in which every action is measured, verified, and approved by machines.
Today, it’s out-of-bounds calls. Tomorrow, it’s automatic travel violations. Next year? AI-generated foul probabilities. A few years after that, an algorithm to calculate whether a defender’s facial expression suggested illegal contact. At some point, the referee becomes less an official and more a highly paid hall monitor standing near a very expensive computer.
Basketball fans should pay attention, because technology rarely arrives with a modest appetite. Name one piece of tech that hasn’t colonized everything around it. Even something that began as small as a step counter now grades how you sleep. VAR will not be the exception.
The NBA undoubtedly has officiating problems. Every fan knows it. Every playoff game seems to produce a new controversy. But there’s a real difference between improving officiating and outsourcing the soul of the game.
Sports are compelling because humans play them and humans judge them. Players make mistakes. Coaches make mistakes. Referees make mistakes. Fans make mistakes too. I once bet a ridiculous sum on a United academy prospect I was sure would be the next Ronaldo. Last I checked, he was playing for a third-tier side somewhere in East Asia.
Perfection sounds appealing. Then one day, perhaps when it’s too late, you realize perfection is often sterile. This risk, now facing soccer and basketball, ultimately menaces all our sports. In our obsession with eliminating every error, we seem bent on eliminating everything that makes sports feel alive: all its unpredictable moments. Arguments, controversies, the stories people remember for decades.
Yes, once every decision is handed to a machine, the games may become more accurate. They will also become a lot less interesting, because they’ll be so much less human.
To me, at least, a world where nobody can scream at the referee from the couch hardly sounds like progress at all.
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