Just Do It!

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What a news week for shock, horror! stories. And I'm not talking about proper news such as the Middle East or Ukraine, either. On the one hand you've got Reform's £72,000,000 windfall, courtesy of two people with more money than sense, who are both in the business of making even more money out of non-money: ain't Crypto wonderful? And Haaland's wrongly-allowed goal by the VAR in the Manchester derby this weekend. Whilst neither are now undo-able retrospectively, there are to be frank, quite simple solutions available to prevent either from occurring again. On the political donation front, just cap donations and electoral spending for parties across the board: level the playing field, and secondly ensure the rigorous nationality/residency rules to cut out stupid loopholes. As to the footie; fit GPS trackers to all players, officials and the ball, and track the lot in real time; use the data to assess automatically the validity or otherwise of decisions made under this historically most contentious of Association Football rules.

For Christ's sake, footie is a bloody simple game when compared with Rugby Union or Cricket, and both rub along quite well with the technology now used to police their on-field decision-making. Tennis has long since stopped wringing its pearls about the issue and done away with humans almost altogether at the highest level: why does soccer have to be so precious about it? Pundits talk about delays to play and the upsetting of the dynamics and pacing of the game, but a real time tracking and decision-making system would not interfere at all: a decision would be instantaneous. If you can choreograph a swarm of a hundred drones in real time for display purposes - common enough today - then tracking twenty-two players, three officials and a ball should be a walk in the park. Like everything else in this stupid world, answers constantly stare us in the face. The problem is inaction: just get the f**k on with things, people...

Postscript: Dealing with political donations is obvious and frankly trivial, but if FIFA ever adopt my ideas on play-tracking, I hereby claim formally, full copyright on the design ;0)...

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