Wimbledon fired the line judges. What should tech actually do for sport?

The quietest revolution in tennis

In 2025, Wimbledon ended a 148-year tradition: all of its line judges were replaced by an electronic line-calling system — eighteen high-speed cameras per court, an automated voice shouting "out!" within a tenth of a second. The Australian Open had already made the switch in 2021, the US Open in 2022. Among the majors, only Roland-Garros still backs humans.

It did not go quietly. In the first week, the system was accidentally deactivated mid-match — a human error, ironically — and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova was forced to replay a point she had visibly won, telling the umpire the game had been "stolen" from her. Players complained; commentators philosophized; researchers pointed out that even a very accurate system doesn't eliminate judgment, it just relocates it.

We run software for sports venues, so we watch these debates with professional interest — and, honestly, with mixed feelings. The Wimbledon story is a clean case study in the question every sports technologist should be forced to answer: what is technology actually for in sport?

Two kinds of automation

It helps to separate two very different things technology can automate.

Automating judgment means replacing a human decision that is part of the sport's fabric: the line call, the lbw decision, the foul. The case for it is strong where precision is measurable — a ball is in or out, and cameras genuinely see that better than tired human eyes at full stretch. But the Wimbledon week showed the cost side: when the machine fails, there's no graceful fallback, because the humans who used to be the fallback are gone. And something subtler is lost — the shared theater of the challenge, the crowd's slow clap, the visible fallibility that made the sport feel human.

Automating logistics is the unglamorous sibling: scheduling, booking, payments, access, membership admin, finding a fourth player for Thursday. Nobody writes columns defending the 148-year tradition of the paper booking ledger or the phone call to reserve a court. When this kind of automation fails, a human can always step in; when it works, nobody notices — people just play more.

Our view, and the principle we build by: technology in sport earns its place by absorbing logistics, and should touch judgment and experience only with extreme care. The best tech in a sports life is the tech you stop noticing.

The friction ledger

Here's a useful exercise for any player — or anyone who runs a venue. Count the minutes of friction around a single hour of sport: the group chat to find a time, the back-and-forth about who books, the queue at the desk, the who-owes-whom arithmetic afterwards, the no-show that wrecked the plan.

For a lot of recreational players, that overhead is genuinely why they play less than they want to. The research on exercise habits we've written about before says friction is a habit-killer: every extra decision point is a place where "this week doesn't work" gets in. Logistics automation is therefore not an operational nicety — it's participation infrastructure. A court that's one tap away gets played on more than a court that's a phone call away. That's the whole thesis behind booking systems like ours, and it's why we get more excited about a frictionless recurring booking than about any scoreboard feature.

What judgment-tech can teach venue-tech anyway

Even though we'd draw the line differently than Wimbledon did, the ELC saga carries lessons for any technology in sport:

• Fail loudly, recover humanly. The worst moment at Wimbledon wasn't a wrong call — it was the system silently not calling at all. Good sports tech makes its failures obvious and keeps a human path open.
• Precision isn't the same as trust. The cameras were almost certainly more accurate than the judges they replaced; players still trusted them less. Trust is built by transparency and recourse, not by accuracy statistics.
• Protect the ritual. Sport is not a throughput problem. The handshake, the banter at the desk, the drink after — a venue optimized purely for efficiency can automate away the reasons people come. Tech should clear the path to those moments, not through them.

The takeaway

Next time you meet a piece of sports technology — at a Grand Slam or at your local club — ask the two-question test: Does it remove friction between people and playing? Or does it insert itself into the playing? The first kind deserves adoption. The second deserves scrutiny, however impressive the cameras. And if you run a venue: before adding anything clever, find the three most annoying minutes in your members' week and delete them. That's the technology they'll actually thank you for.