The next season of the Premier League, the top division of English football, will use iPhones instead of VAR. The English league, hiring the services of Genius Sports, which already works with the NBA, will have a combination of iPhones 14 and 15 with its own program to detect offside positions. The Dragon program promises to be more efficient than the current technology — and than the VAR judgment, but the final decision will still be with the on-field referee.
Genius Sports, which will be backed by its subsidiary Second Spectrum, said 28 iPhones would be used at Premier League stadiums. The number of models could be expanded to 100 smartphones in the future. One advantage of using mobile phones is that they are cheaper than traditional cameras.
iPhones capture thousands of points on players
The iPhone cameras will capture between 7,000 and 10,000 points on the players’ bodies. This should help detect offsides with a centimetre advantage. With these thousands of points, it will be easier to know if the torso was really in front of the other player, for example.
The semi-automatic offside marking methods used in the 2022 World Cup and this year’s European Championship use a few dozen points, between 10 and 15 cameras and a sensor on the ball. However, it can have some blind spots, such as when players are too close. And the number of cameras is not enough to cover all angles of the play.
The high frame rate of the iPhone 14 and 15 also helps to understand the start of the play, when the player made the pass and when the ball left his feet. At the beginning of the project, the smartphones will record at only 100 fps, but this value may increase to up to 200 fps in the future.
Recording non-stop for 90 minutes heats up the iPhone. That’s why the phones will be stored in a special compartment (also to protect them from rain) with an extra ventilation system. In this compartment, they will also be connected to the charger.
Project continuity will still depend on approval
However, despite its promise, the final word on Dragon’s adoption and continuation will lie with players and fans. Even though the technology debuts this Friday, it will still need to be accepted.
Those who follow football may find VAR slow — and sometimes this delay ends up with the referee making a serious mistake. If Dragon (and iPhones) were more accurate and faster, they would already be ahead of VAR.
The video referee is the one who calls the on-field referee to assess a suspicious play. So, there are two stages of verification: in the first, the VAR needs to understand whether there was an offside. In the second, the referee makes an assessment. With Dragon, the idea is that the system notifies the referee and he immediately goes to the TV — and then goes what he judges.
The funny thing will be to see the offsides marked by iPhones in Manchester United matches, whose main sponsor is Snapdragon.
With information: Wired and Phone Arena.
