Premier League Hails AI Adjudicators for 'Offside' Analysis
AI is getting set to make the beautiful game more efficient, as one of football’s [soccer] biggest leagues, the English Premier League, will be using it to help judge the hotly contested topic of offside.
With the 2024-2025 Premier League season beginning this weekend, referees will introduce the advanced AI tool designed to enhance the accuracy of offside decisions.
In April, Premier League clubs voted unanimously to implement the semi-automatic offside technology (SAOT), with officials emphasising its ability to provide "quicker and more consistent" offside rulings.
The SAOT system debuted at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, employing sophisticated tracking to deliver precise and speedy calls.
"The introduction of semi-automated offside technology should not only reduce delays but also instil greater confidence in the whole process," said Tony Scholes, Premier League Chief Football Officer.
For fans and pundits, this AI-powered system addresses a longstanding issue in football, where offside decisions cause much dismay to fans and footballers alike.
AI augmenting the beautiful game
For all non-football-loving nations, offside is when a player is ahead of the last defender (excluding the goalkeeper) when the ball is passed.
Previously, these rules were solely administered by linespersons running down the edges of the pitch to see when infractions were made.
But this system left plenty of room for error, as limited visibility meant that decisions were often erroneously called, oftentimes to dramatic effect like a team being denied a victory.
Further efforts were made to further improve this system, with the 2019 introduction of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR), which has been courting controversy due to the delays it had in stopping play while officials analysed replays.
Working alongside VAR, sports data and technology company Genius Sports and subsidiary Second Spectrum, have made the new tool called Drago, which powers SAOT. The system aims to correct such issues by offering a more definitive judgement on offside calls. Debuted in the Arab Cup in Qatar 2021, the system demonstrated abilities that allowed referees to make offside calls in fewer than 10 seconds.
In the Qatar world cup, the system transmitted its location 500 times a second, alongside that of 12 tracking cameras around the stadium that followed both the ball and 29 different points on a player’s body (the cameras relay their information 50 times a second).
Although the system will still require human input to decide if an offside player is involved in the play, SAOT faster operation will hopefully lead to quicker turnover than the VAR being currently used.
Football’s future with AI
AI’s ability to improve efficiencies across a range of tasks is seeing it get widespread adoption across sectors, and football is no exception.
Alongside this technology’s previous use in games, AI is being used to augment many elements of football, including the analysis and prediction of future players.
The Football Association (FA) partnered with Google Cloud to analyse years of scouting reports to uncover hidden talent through AI.
Equally, Google’s DeepMind collaboration with Liverpool FC on TacticAI advises coaches on corner kick strategies baked off analysis of previous data.
SAOT is set to debut, not in the beginning of the season, but sometime in the autumn. Whether it proves a success or not, is down to the footballers and fans to decide.
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