The English Premier League is among the best football leagues in the world, but like every other top league, it has seen its fair share of refereeing controversies. This has prompted the league to contract the company Genius Sports to help officials make offside calls. They’ve found quite an innovative method of doing so: the use of dozens of iPhones.
Offside calls have proven to be especially challenging for Premier League referees. Last season, Ange Postecoglu’s Tottenham Hotspur was heavily favored by a miscommunication between the referees in a game against Liverpool.
This prompted the Merseyside club to protest against PGMOL, English Football’s refereeing body, and they now aim to improve tools accessible to referees in making correct calls.
Technology is at the forefront of the Premier League
The Premier League has been using Video Assistant Refereeing technology for a couple of years now.
For offside calls, the Premier League and its VAR began using an automated system consisting of learning-powered limb-tracking tech and embedded soccer ball sensors.
This remarkable software can track up to 29 points of players’ bodies but is still not helpful enough, given that it also includes a “human error” factor and extensive delays in making calls.
Thanks to the previous inefficiency of this system, the Premier League will introduce a system Genius calls “Semi-Assisted Offside Technology” in November.
Semi-Assisted Offside Technology made its debut in the 2023-24 Champions League
Genius’s Semi-Assisted Offside Technology made its debut during the 2023-24 season of the Champions League and did so without any major controversies.
More impressive, however, is the fact that it was also used at the 2024 European Championships in Germany with a great degree of success.
The SAOT system can accurately create real-time 3D images of every player, which helps officials decide where the offside line is on the field, and where all 22 players are in relation to the line. However, the company needs lots of cameras to accomplish this.
Genius moved away from using 4K cameras because they were too expensive. They have instead chosen to implement iPhones into the system in the Premier League.
There will be 24 to 28 iPhones deployed in every single Premier League game to get coverage from the pitch and sidelines.
The chosen devices for the company are iPhone 15 Pros, and they will be mounted on rigs that will hold two phones at the same time at different angles.
iPhones will give the Premier League and Genius 10,000 data points
This “army” of iPhones will give Genius and the Premier League almost 10,000 data points that will allow the system to render 3D animations, showing player positions in real-time.
Additionally, iPhones can record at very high framerates and have local computer vision processing, making them ideal for Genius’s use.
This process will help referees more effectively determine whether a player is on or offside during a specific play, but its success will, of course, once again rely on how referees in the Premier League use the technology.
