English Premier League to adopt iPhone offside technology — rage at Apple instead of incompetent referees this season

football in a stadium (Image credit: MLS)

Are you fed up with poor VAR offside decisions in the English Premier League taking forever? Well, it looks like the world's most popular soccer division will introduce a fleet of the best iPhones to take charge of offside calls.

According to WIRED, the League is set to introduce a "new semiautomated offside tech later in the 2024–25 season," using a new "smartphone-based system known internally as 'Dragon.'"

The system is made by Genius Sports and its subsidiary Second Spectrum who provide lots of tracking data in the NBA. 'Dragon' will use "dozens of iPhones" capturing "high-frame-rate video from multiple angles." This will completely replace the current Video Assistant Referee (VAR) technology which is often slow and sometimes even incorrect.

WIRED claims this is just the beginning and could introduce "new motion-capture and artificial-intelligence models across many other sports."

28 iPhones on the pitch

Genius Sports claims 'Dragon' will use at least 28 iPhone cameras in every Premier League stadium, with some stadiums getting more iPhones depending on the size. The exact model of iPhones expected to be used is unclear but they will be iPhone 14 and newer, so expect to see some iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro cameras on the sidelines this season.

WIRED's exclusive report states, "Once the iPhones are positioned around the pitch, together they capture a constant stream of video from multiple angles. Camera mounts can be moved to change coverage zones in certain facilities, per Genius, but will typically be stationary during actual play to ensure proper coverage and avoid recalibration needs on the fly. This wealth of visuals apparently gives Dragon the ability to track between 7,000 and 10,000 points on each player at all times."

'Dragon' captures video at 200 frames per second (fps)with the initial Premier League system capped at 100 fps. That's an insane amount of data points that will hopefully drastically improve offside calls in the Premier League that kicks off its new season on Friday evening with Manchester United vs Fulham at Old Trafford.

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John-Anthony Disotto is the How To Editor of iMore, ensuring you can get the most from your Apple products and helping fix things when your technology isn’t behaving itself. Living in Scotland, where he worked for Apple as a technician focused on iOS and iPhone repairs at the Genius Bar, John-Anthony has used the Apple ecosystem for over a decade and prides himself in his ability to complete his Apple Watch activity rings. John-Anthony has previously worked in editorial for collectable TCG websites and graduated from The University of Strathclyde where he won the Scottish Student Journalism Award for Website of the Year as Editor-in-Chief of his university paper. He is also an avid film geek, having previously written film reviews and received the Edinburgh International Film Festival Student Critics award in 2019. John-Anthony also loves to tinker with other non-Apple technology and enjoys playing around with game emulation and Linux on his Steam Deck.

In his spare time, John-Anthony can be found watching any sport under the sun from football to darts, taking the term “Lego house” far too literally as he runs out of space to display any more plastic bricks, or chilling on the couch with his French Bulldog, Kermit.