AI and Euro 2024: VAR is shaking up football — and it’s not going away

VAR uses cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence to help referees make decisions. AI and Euro 2024: VAR is shaking up football -and it's not going awayAs the UEFA Euro 2024 football tournament gets under way, the all-seeing eye of artificial intelligence (AI) is glued to the action stronger than the eyes of even the most ardent fans.Referees are able to track any slight motion made by the ball and players, thanks to the latest video-assisted referee (VAR) technology.Since its introduction in 2016, VAR has been hotly debated among football fans.Inconsistencies in how referees apply the technology, and the time they sometimes take to make decisions has fuelled discontent.The English Premier League even held a vote earlier this month on whether to scrap VAR altogetherclubs ultimately voted 19 to 1 in favour of keeping it, but the opposition highlighted the need for improvements.An upgraded, semi-automated version of the technology incorporating more-advanced AI and a real-time location-tracking chip embedded in the ball was first used during a major global tournament in the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.Euro 2024 features its latest iteration.Nature spoke to John Eric Goff, a sports physicist at the University of Lynchburg, Virginia, about how far VAR has come and what the future holds for it.How does AI observe a football match?I think the perception when people hear 'AI' is of a sentient being working alongside humans.But these are algorithms and machines capable of rapidly processing large amounts of data that a referee wouldn't otherwise have access to.Above the football pitch, 10 cameras under the roof placed throughout the stadium are able to look at 29 locations on each player's body.So with 22 players on the pitch, there are more than 600 points in motion.Fifty times a second, these data will be fed into a computer.All these different cameras can essentially tell you in real time where the players are located on the pitch, where the ball is and how fast the ball, players and their body parts are moving.