The aesthetics of sports

In reflecting on the relationship between story and the rules of the game,  Brian Phillips writes: 

What that means is that, if we care about the sport as a story, we have to hope that the people in charge of running it do their jobs  just badly enough to ensure that the  Hand of God is possible. The wider the circle within which you’re willing to see the game as aesthetic, in other words, the more you wind up relying on chance and accident. If soccer is only a game—that is, aesthetic only in the most limited and technical sense—then it can achieve perfection as a deliberate design or as a successfully realized intention. If it’s a story—that is, aesthetic in a more primary sense—it can’t. If you want a masterpiece, the artist has to screw up. The lamest defense of bad refereeing in the world is “human error is part of the game.” It isn’t; but it is certainly, and problematically, part of the story.