Digital technology has most certainly arrived in sport. In top-level fixtures, where the margins can be wafer thin, and the stakes incredibly high, technology allows confirmation of refereeing or umpire decisions and enables focus to be more on the sport itself and less on its inevitable controversies.

Whilst I strongly doubt that the day will ever come when fans and players do not feel they have been hard done by in some way, technology limits how much they can legitimately complain about perceived injustices or use them as excuses for poor performance.

At the recent Ashes in Australia this winter, viewers waited with baited breath to find out whether the Umpire Decision Review System would invalidate the physical Umpire’s decision about whether the batsman should have been dismissed or not.

The Hawk-Eye system, which is used in Cricket as well as in Tennis, is well-established, having debuted at the 2007 Wimbledon tournament. In athletics, technology prevents an athlete’s foot from crossing the line before the starting gun. And video refereeing in rugby makes use of instant replay technology when decisions are unclear for the referee on the pitch. Whilst limits are generally placed on how much technology can be invoked (allowing each team or player only a limited number of appeals to the technology for example), in an attempt to maintain the pace and fluidity of the game, its use is a sensible innovation in a context where events can potentially turn on the basis of one incorrect decision.

Social media is another area where sport is keeping up with the rest of the world. Engaging with players and athletes on Twitter represents an element of democratisation in elite-level sport, when these people can otherwise seem almost completely removed from their fans. Several footballers regularly tweet, and give fans the opportunity to ask them questions - access which would have been all but denied to people before the advent of social media. More broadly, debate in sport rages across multiple channels; from blogs and Twitter to TV and radio, no medium is untouched by the passionate argument that perhaps only politics can rival sport in generating.

Whilst digital has been warmly embraced off the pitch, on the pitch, football is lagging behind. Few will forget the injustice felt up and down the country when Frank Lampard’s goal quite clearly crossed the line against Germany at the 2010 World Cup. Simple goal-line technology would have confirmed this was the case, yet until recently its adoption had been passionately opposed by FIFA President Sepp Blatter. He cited many reasons for this, including wanting to maintain universality in football (i.e. have the same rules and process at all levels of the sport) and his fear that this technology would inevitably lead to the advent of video refereeing.

However, his main reasoning revolved around the human element of sport, with Blatter saying “Fans love to debate any given incident in a game. It is part of the human nature of our sport.” Yet given the debate that flourishes within football - advanced in no small part by social media - about the relative talent of players, a team’s chances of winning trophies and different tactical styles, there seems no need to engineer debate about whether the rules of the game have been followed, when there are simple ways of ascertaining this through technology.

Blatter has recently seemed to warm to the possibility of goal-line technology, suggesting perhaps that he is beginning to understand that digital innovations can restrict debate to the more substantive issues in sport, debate which itself takes advantage of the new forms of communication enabled by digital technology.