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The English Premier League (EPL) is dropping the video-assistant referee (VAR) system for the 2024-2025 season and replacing it with a new system that includes dozens of iPhones to help decide offside calls.
Genius Sports designed this new semiautomated offside tech, internally known as “Dragon.” The previously used VAR system is notorious for causing controversies, per Wired. It would lead to “extensive delays and human process errors” and “concerns about the precision of in-game calls.” Genius Sports has worked with NBA basketball for years on “optical tracking and data-based work.”
For EPL, Genius will start by positioning 28 iPhones in each stadium. Genius mentioned that it might add more iPhones at select stadiums throughout the year. Wired says these will mostly be iPhone 14 models, but The Verge claims Matt Fleckenstein, Genius’s CPO, told them in an interview that iPhone 15 Pros will be used to get the job done.
The iPhones will be enclosed in waterproof cases with cooling fans and a connection to a power outlet. A couple of mounts, each holding up to four iPhones, will be placed across the stadiums. The mounts will be movable but usually left stationary during a game to record video from a specific angle.
According to Wired’s report, Dragon can track “between 7,000 and 10,000 [data] points on each player at all times.” This would consider features as specific as “muscle mass, skeletal frame differences, and even gait,” all of which contribute towards the chances of an offside. The Verge adds that, according to Fleckenstein, other VAR systems could only use 30 or 40 points on a player. Per Wired, Dragon can capture up to 200 frames per second, while today’s video tech maxes out at 50 or 60 FPS. The system will top out at 100 FPS to “balance latency, accuracy, and costs.”
I found it impressive that the new system will also be able to predict an upcoming offside. In an event like this, the camera frame rate will automatically be scaled up to track the potential offside closely. Right after the event, it will be scaled down to save power. Dragon will apparently also be able to input all the data it gathers into a machine learning system running behind the scenes, internally referred to as “object semantic mesh.” It will use intelligence to analyze the data and make itself smarter by learning from it.
