Far from the great reaches or even the smallest concerns of the FIFA headquarters, a harmless miscue in a small-scale youth soccer tournament managed to allude to a global hot button soccer issue.

The play occurred at this past weekend’s Las Vegas College Showcase where U15 Slammers FC player Ashlynn Harryman fired a should-be goal that appeared to bounce inside the upper right portion of the net and ricochet back to the goalie.

It was clearly a score to everyone except for the striped-shirt men that mattered.

At around the same moment, but a world away, FIFA president Joseph “Sepp” Blatter was rejecting the notion that technology could be beneficial in the game of soccer.

Blatter wrote the following on FIFA’s website:

“The application of modern technologies can be very costly and therefore not applicable on a global level. This means that the game must be played in the same way no matter where you are in the world.”

Blatter is 100 percent correct … soccer is played the same way everywhere; the same fallible, antiquated way it always has been – and that’s a problem.

What Blatter and the rest of the rule makers, who have ruled out implementing new technology anytime in the foreseeable future, are missing is that technology isn’t an indictment on the game, but an alignment with the changing times. 

Look around. Professional football uses instant replay to confirm rulings; basketball has incorporated it, and even a sport that positions itself as our pastime, baseball, has joined the rest of the 21st century.

But not soccer. 

Nope. The one game that transcends worldwide beyond all others is content with falling behind the curve and staying vulnerable to the highest degree of human error – for better or worse.

As one Vegas onlooker pointed out in jest after watching the referee’s blown call:

“If this were a national championship we’d all be dodging bullets.”