The True Story of VAR: Intelligent Machine Vision for Football

The use of technologies in football has been explored later compared to many other sports. Italy was among the first football nations to begin research into the use of advanced technologies based on Artificial Intelligence for the automatic and non-automatic detection of events to support Football.

The facts reported in this manuscript highlight the role played by Italian researchers from the National Research Council (CNR), starting from 1999, in the study and development of mature technologies, initially for the automatic detection of the Phantom Goal event and subsequently for Offside and the Monitoring of Events in the Penalty Area.

Before describing these technologies, the Author highlights the functional principles of a vision machine based on artificial intelligence capable of imitating humans to detect game events and automatically support referees. In this regard, the limits of human vision in detecting complex and rapid game events are also illustrated. At the same time, it also explains the impossibility of a vision machine to detect particular complex game events.

To understand the intelligent systems proposed for football, some examples of intelligent automatons developed in other sectors that learn autonomously or with the help of humans are reported. In particular, it illustrates how a small robot learns to play football as a child of a few years of age would do, and mention is made of the Robocup, a global competition of robots of various sizes that play football.

The manuscript also widely reported that these research and prototypes developed for football and tested in the context of real matches took place in the Medieval Era of FIFA, where technological support was denied and considered taboo. Furthermore, it highlights how these technologies have been valorized since 2016 by the new FIFA leaders in the so-called Era of Football Enlightenment, which led to the current VAR (Video Assistant Referee) technology.