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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7627337" data-attributes="member: 4937">The thing is, VAR is there as soon as a sport is televised and recorded, because every fan of the sport will review every play of the sport on there own whether the sporting officials have to our not.  So a sport has to acknowledge that video review is taking place whether it accepts VAR or not.When a sport becomes televised, then every one of the viewers can see that Maradona tipped the ball over the keeper with his hand.  The video review happened.  Even the viewers that didn't see it the first time, could see it easily on the replay.   That is something modern sport has to accept, and typically the problem that VAR reveals is a problem with VAR itself, but a problem with the rules having no uniform application and being treated as if they are unambiguous and produce unambiguous results when in fact they clearly don't.   That's the thing VAR forces a sport to acknowledge, even if VAR isn't a refereeing tool.   The very act of televising a sport means that the guardians of that sport no long can act as if they are unaccountable to the public.   Televising a sport democratizes it.I'm a fan of two spectator sports: soccer and sumo, and both are embroiled in different stages of this controversy.   Sumo recognized very early on after matches became televised that the very act of televising the sport would change it and was an early adopter of VAR and has some of the most elegant video review in sport.   But what sumo has thus far failed to recognize is that its rules are ambiguous and that in ambiguous situations you ought to tend to prefer a non-ambiguous outcome if you can.  They don't seem to understand that if you can see what is going on clearly but you still don't know what to review, or if you can't see what is going on clearly even if it is in slow motion in front of you, then this indicates that there is something wrong with the rules.The history of this in US soccer is huge.  What many people are unaware of in this country or the world is that in the 1920's and 1930's soccer was a pretty big thing in the United States and we were pretty good at it.  The reason soccer died in the US was in part that the American leagues told FIFA that the game was too ambiguous and too arbitrary and too dependent on the referee for the taste of American fans - they wanted to make a bunch of rules adjustments including hockey style 'penalty box' for play (remember at this time 'yellow cards' weren't even an official rule), and they wanted to allow 3 in game substitutions per match (something that wouldn't be official for another 30 years in FIFA play), and so forth - and that if they didn't make these adjustments, the American fan wouldn't put up with it because they expected sports officials to be accountable to the viewers as if the game was played for their benefit.  Soccer to this day treats the referee as a little unaccountable autocrat, and that's only slowly changing.  And FIFA and the USA leagues ended up in a fight that undermined our professional leagues, and when the great depression hit, between the fact that soccer was already losing out to baseball as the more widespread American sport and the one that worked better as a radio sport and the infighting in the US leagues, soccer went bankrupt in the US and was basically gone for 50 years thereafter and is still very much an 'also exists' sort of fifth wheel at least with respect to male athletics (its been readily embraced and even promoted as a women's sport).</blockquote>

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