Dr. Tom Guarriello
Nov 7 · 4 min read

Sports Fans: On The Tech Wars Frontline

Image from PremierLeague.com

A funny thing is happening in global sports: technology.

Used to be we sports fans would watch games on TV, see errors the people officiating the games obviously didn’t/couldn’t possibly see, complain vehemently (“we wuz robbed!”), and then placate ourselves with platitudes about how…somehow…“bad calls all even out in the end.”

Simpler times.

But today that’s all changed. Today, leagues routinely halt live action to inspect official decisions using “instant replay” or “booth review” in football, baseball, hockey, or basketball, or the more up-scale branded, ahem, “Video Assistant Referee” (VAR) in soccer. This follows decades of, mostly successful, dispute resolution of “photo finishes” in Thoroughbred horse racing and jaw-dropping in/out calls in tennis.

The theory behind these reviews was pretty straightforward: why should everyone but the officials on the field be able to see that a ball was clearly over the goal line when one poorly positioned referee got it wrong in real time? Just watch the video and change the call; get it right, for Pete’s sake!

Simple! Fair!! Objective!!! All hail our technological progress!!!!

Not so fast there, Elon!

No matter the sport, the addition of slow motion, 360° rotated, microscopically zoomed views of live action has become the source of even more heated emotional reactions by players, coaches, commentators and fans. The latter (at least), are now placing newly-legal (and some, not-quite-so-legal) wagers on events that are turning on the results of answers to minuscule questions, e.g., was that player out of bounds or was there one blade of green grass between his foot and the white line when he caught the ball? And, while we’re at it, did he really have “possession” of the ball or was he juggling it ever so slightly before his knee touched the ground? Questions of space and time must now be routinely answered and those answers reviewed by millions of viewers at never-before possible scales.

The result? Chaos!

The “we wuz robbed” complaints are now the norm, with Twitter and Instagram stills, video clips, and GIFs offered as “evidence” to demonstrate the injustice.

And, it’s not just fans who are complaining. Football, baseball, hockey, and basketball coaches have been granted “coaches challenges” to formally dispute official calls. (Wisely, this privilege has been withheld from soccer coaches around the world, most likely for fear of adding still another source of in-stadium havoc to an already volatile recreational activity.) Whether triggered by a coach (at the behest of a team’s backstage video-reviewing employee), an additional in-stadium official, or a group of eye-in-the-sky specters in Secaucus, London, Zurich, or Park Avenue studios, live action in every major sport is now routinely halted as frame-by-frame analyses stretch on for minutes-that-feel-like-hours in search of the irrefutable definitive truth about the consequences of an outstretched pinky. The ancient search for the “really real” is now dressed in sports uniforms!

The standard for reversing live action calls in most sports has been set high: there must be “clear and obvious” evidence to change a real-time call. Never have two words intended to resolve a problem been more problematic. My “clear” is your vague; your “obvious” is my obscure!

The result of all this “progress” is unending argument. New Orleans Saints fans even took the NFL to court over a no-call in last year’s National Football Conference championship game against the Los Angeles Rams. At lesser scales, every sporting event now includes an obligatory list of missed, “botched,” or at minimum controversial decisions made by referees, and either upheld or overturned based on technological intervention.

So what, you say? It’s sports. Big deal. Who cares? (All those bettors aside, that is.)

If only sports were the only area that revealed technology’s failure to irrefutably resolve vexing human questions. Unfortunately, the greater our technological prowess becomes, the more we come face-to-face with a bigger, deeper issue: no matter how advanced technology becomes, humans will always have to make subjective decisions. Hell, the “really real” is now even in doubt in physics.

In a wide range of areas from loan applications, to job interviews, criminal identification and drone target selection, thousands of determinations are being automated in the hope that “objective algorithms” will replace the now-familiar set of unavoidable cognitive and emotional biases that color all human decision-making.

Gradually, we are becoming increasingly aware that human subjectivity will always be at the root of all decisions, whether we’re actually making them or creating the algorithms that we assign to do so.

The fact that sports fans are now on the front line of this realization is ironic: the one area in life where we were supposed to be able to “just watch the game” has turned into a hotbed of contention about the ultimate role of technology in modern life and the nature of reality.

Sports fans can be excused for feeling, “We wuz robbed!”

Indeed!

Dr. Tom Guarriello

Written by

Psychologist, management consultant, School of Visual Art Branding founding faculty member, founder and co-host of RoboPsych Podcast.

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