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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

I can’t see how this isn’t celebrating dishonesty and unsportsmanship - both things that undermine sport not make it.

You are missing the point. Football is not just a sport. It is not made of cold analysis and rules.

As Sartre said: Il calcio è una metafora della vita. Football is a metaphor of life, it is arduous, hard, difficult, full of suffering with redeeming glory. Miracles are possible, and there is always time.

I'm not sure why Sartre is quoted in Italian here, but this seems to be a spurious quote all the same. I could only find two sources with a version of that quote in French and neither had a citation of the original source. In fact, the only real quote from him I could find on soccer was «Au football, tout est compliqué par la présence de l'équipe adverse» ("In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.").

Interestingly, during my search I found an apt quote for this discussion from another 20th century French philosopher. Camus once said «Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois» ("What I know about morality, I owe to football"). I guess he would be missing the point here too.

Look that first goal broke my heart. However, real football has uncertainty, it has games where you were robbed. Games where the referee blow the whistle a fraction before the ball hits the net (no goal). When a goal is given you can celebrate, especially in a live match. Now VAR robs something of the game. The second goal would not have happened with the first goal being ruled against. Not driven the next England side to semi-final to almost avenge the 1st goal. VAR is terrible. Football without VAR is like live - full of injustice, full of revenge, full off real emotions.

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