FIFA's cameras, sensors, and AI systems at the 2025 World Cup have made the game more precise and less watchable. The Video Assistant Referee, combined with automated offside detection and other sensor-driven tools, has drained the spontaneity that makes football matter.
The original piece is worth reading for how it traces the specific mechanism of failure: not that the technology is wrong, but that precision itself is the problem. Football's drama lives in ambiguity. Automate the ambiguity out, and you automate the drama out with it.
The harder question the article raises is behavioral, not technical. The tools exist, governing bodies will use them, and no one in power will voluntarily pull back. That loop, technology deployed because it can be rather than because it should be, is the story that extends well beyond sport.
[READ ORIGINAL →]