My musing on the subject of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as they have affected Manchester United prompted reader Ron (emphasis added):

When teams at the top play each other, or teams at the bottom, they are referred to as ’six pointers’. You have the opportunity to claim three points for yourself as well as deny your rivals three points and the only way wrong decisions in these games can even out are when you play each other in the second fixture of the season. 

… For example, if the Chelsea goal was offside, it resulted to 2 more points for Chelsea and 2 less points for United (ie. 4 points difference). If a decision goes for United in the next game, it will not even out for the decision in the chelsea game. For that decision to even out, it will take another bad decision between the same 2 teams, but in favour of United. 

Can this be right? 

Each team plays 38 games a season in the league. The winner is the team with the most points. If MUFC play Chelsea and get a bad decision and Chelsea win, Chelsea get the three points. But if MUFC then play eg Fulham and MUFC profit from a bad decision, MUFC get three points.

Assuming (big assumption) that over a season every one of the top few teams gets six bad decisions in its favour, each winning some extra points. Let’s also assume that the number of points won by each of these teams through these bad decisions is 10.

Why does it matter if one of those decisions comes in a match against a fellow top team? That fellow top team likewise will pick up ten ‘undeserved’ points elsewhere over the season.

Thus this time Chelsea picked up (say) two ‘undeserved’ points by defeating MUFC. But if things average out over the season, they did not pick up those two somewhere else.

Bottom Line: the overall winning team is the one which gets the most points. And it does not matter whether it gets those points from beating the team which comes second or the team which comes last.

Of course as the number of games diminishes, it is all the more important to win every remaining game, so the psychological impact of a bad decision which costs points is all the greater. This obscures the fact that three points won on the first day of the season are worth as many as three points won in the final game. 

Plus, of course, the team which loses the title through a bad decision on the last day of the season had the opportunity to win it only because it already had had its fair share of undeserved points over matches earlier in the season.

Whatever.

If technology is used to help give better decisions, which technology?

There is technology which allows people to see almost instant recordings of incidents from different angles so that it is clear(er) what in fact happened. This in effect means having more human referees watching everything. That sort of technology probably would have given Tottenham their disallowed goal against MUFC, and led to the Drogba goal against MUFC being disallowed.

Then there is technology which gives an electronic simulation of what has happened, allowing some sort of digital judgement to be made instead of human judgement. See eg the Hawk-Eye simulations for tennis and cricket, which purport to tell us what happened (or would have happened) to a fast-moving ball.

That technology is intriguing and seductive.

But like Climate Change projections, it is only as credible as the assumptions and data-sets programmed into it. And, if they are not made public, why should they be trusted? Could they even open the way to hi-tech corruption?