Why is VAR connected to the internet? Are they trying to gather data on offside players customers to improve recommedations?

I worked in a similar system. The raw data from the field first goes to a cloud hosted event queue of some sort, then a database, then back to whatever app/screen on field. The data doesn't just power on-field displays. There's a lot of online websites, etc that needs to pull data from an api.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if people pay for API access to the data. I've worked with live sports data before, it's a very profitable industry to be in when you're the one selling the data.

Of course in a sane world you'd have an internal fallback for when cloud connectivity fails but I'm sure someone looked at the cost and said "eh, what's the worst that could happen?"

A silver lining to this cloud (outage).