State-of-the-art technology and precise data are an essential part of professional sports today. This encourages top performance, but the fun and passion are lost.
A comment from Claudio Müller
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For years, the sports weekend was sacred to me. But now the joy has given way to growing frustration. The consequence: I canceled my streaming subscriptions to DAZN and Sky. It’s not just the rising prices that are to blame, but also the sport itself. It has lost its soul to the cold, predictable logic of data and technical aids.
Football VAR has never been as annoying as it is today
The best and worst example is the video evidence in football, which came with the promise of making everything fairer. Instead, we experience minute-long interruptions that stifle every emotion. In the end, the decision often remains just as controversial as before.
The millimeter-precise calibration of an offside line depends on the subjective decision of a faceless video assistant who pauses the TV image at a specific point. A millisecond sooner or later, the line can move the crucial millimeters forward or backward. And no VAR advocate has been able to answer the philosophical question of whether it is really an advantage for the attacker if his big toe is two centimeters offside.
Or the interpretation of a handball or foul: was it intentional, was it coincidence or an oversight? After minutes of video study on the sidelines, the end result is always a subjective assessment, which often causes a lack of understanding. The basic problem is: The technology suggests clarity where there is always uncertainty.
The closer you look, the less myth there is
This is comparable to elementary particles. Atoms and electrons were a simple model to describe matter. When physicists discovered the next level of detail, quarks suddenly appeared as even smaller building blocks of our existence. But to this day no one really understands this, despite ever-improving measurement technology. The deeper you delve into the quantum world, the fuzzier our picture of the world becomes. We now have this quarrel in professional sports too.
What’s even sadder is that video evidence not only disempowers the referees on the field, but also robs us of myths. The Wembley goal or the hand of God were more than just mistakes. They were legendary moments that are still discussed decades later and that make sport human, unpredictable and emotional.
We traded this raw, imperfect tension for a sterile search for objectivity and justice that will never exist in football.
Data eats up the football soul
But the technology does not end in the Cologne VAR basement. Data and algorithms have long since devoured, digested and eliminated the game itself. Of course, it is understandable that clubs use every possible advantage to increase their chances of success. After all, this also applies to my world, the media industry.
The only problem is that the playing styles become the same and optimized, soulless strategies prevail. Almost every football team today plays either a variant of Pep Guardiola’s game with the same relay of passes around the penalty area. Or a variant of José Mourinho’s game, which usually uses a chain of three or five to try to stop and counter the opponent’s game as effectively as possible.
NBA: One throw dies
This development is even more blatant and visible in basketball. In the NBA at the beginning of the millennium, layups, midrange jumpers and three-pointers were still fairly evenly distributed. This made the game varied and left room for different types of players.
Then the data analysts came and calculated which throws were the most efficient. The result: The classic medium-distance throw is almost extinct. A throw that was a given for legends like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki.
Today, every NBA team game looks almost the same: drive to the basket and either layup or pass outside for the next three-point attempt. In the following image you can see how the analysts have rationalized away the Jordans, Kobes and Dirks (Source: The Algorithmic Athlete).
The graphics show the distribution of throws in the 2001 NBA season compared to the last season in 2025. The brighter the dots, the more often they were thrown from there. You can change the view using the slider on the image. (And yes, I realize the irony of backing up my argument against data with data.)
© The Algorithmic Athlete
© The Algorithmic Athlete
Formula 1 and MotoGP: World champion is bored
The situation is somewhat different in motorsport. Formula 1 has always been an experimental field for car manufacturers to test technology and later incorporate it into series production. Examples of this include engine control, energy recovery or aerodynamic optimization. The same applies to the Motorcycle World Championship.
But today cars and bikes are so highly equipped that they are increasingly destroying the appeal of racing. It’s about people who fight under extreme G-forces and at the absolute limit not only for victory, but also for control of their vehicle.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish we could go back to the 70s or 80s, when numerous drivers died in accidents every year. The technical development for more security is of course good. However, when even racing drivers criticize these changes, one should sit up and take notice.
Recently, former motorcycle world champion Casey Stoner said that it has never been easier to ride the fastest bikes in the world and that MotoGP is no longer what it used to be – because of all the electronics on the bikes. Today you can “simply turn the throttle with almost 300 hp” without anything happening, says Stoner (source: Motosport Total).
The individual class of riders has long since been replaced by a simple scheme: “Brake hard, throw yourself into the curve, then open the accelerator and press a button to lower the bike,” says Stoner. And that’s no longer nice to look at, even for him. It reminds me of my own unprofessional frenzy on the PS5.
Statistics as advertising space
This development continues seamlessly in the live broadcasts. We are constantly presented with sometimes meaningless data such as expected goals (xG), heatmaps or the maximum sprint speed. They serve more to showcase the data providers than to offer viewers any real added value.
And as if all that wasn’t annoying enough, as a fan I also have to deal with the increasing fragmentation of broadcast rights. Every year the prices rise, and every now and then a new service grabs the lucrative rights, like Paramount+ recently for the Champions League.
That’s why I’m drawing a line now.
For me, the ratio of entertainment to costs and effort has fallen below a critical limit. I now prefer to devote my time to analogue books and the games backlog I’ve built up over the years, even though I’m aware that soulless data analysts have long been involved in deciding which games to produce and how they can best be monetized.
