Artificial Intelligence in FIFA World Cup Football 2018; By - Utpal Chakraborty

Football (popularly know as soccer in USA) as a sport has always been the center of attraction and excitement among the sports lovers as well as among common mass all over the world. Although there are few other sports that has gained popularity in different subcontinents here and there in last few decades but none of them have ever dared to challenge the popularity of football anytime in the past or at present. In fact the popularity and attraction for both football and footballers has increased exponentially over the past few decades with the introduction of humongous platforms like “World Cup Football” organized by prestigious association like FIFA and support from various other independent affluent football clubs.

Today, it has become the sign of dignity and status symbol for a country to host a mega-event like World Cup Football and take advantage of the tourism and business opportunities associated with it. Behind the scene a country can showcase the strength of it’s infrastructure and attract foreign tourists & investors and can create huge business opportunities by hosting such an event.

The all time great footballers around the world has always been encircled with huge fan-following, glamour, abundance of wealth, controversies and what not at the peak of their career and throughout their lifetime. They always have been the style icon and role model for the youth around the world. You will be surprised to know that there exists countries in the world where six out of ten children want to be a footballer, contrary to most other developing countries where common dream is to become a doctor or an engineer. So, now you probably can guess the craze of football & footballers and there is hardly any exaggeration about the popularity of World Cup Football around the nook and corner of the world. Surveys suggest that football is the only sport which is equally popular among all age groups and equally liked by both male and female populations irrespective of being rich or poor.

There has been a long history of usages of advanced tools and cutting edge technologies in different indoor and outdoor sports from time to time but leveraging Artificial Intelligence in an outdoor sports like football for different crucial decision making purpose is probably the first of it’s kind.

Technologies used in different sports: Lets first take a quick look at what are some of the cutting edge technologies and tools used in some other sports which are worth mentioning.

DRS (Decision Review System) or UDRS (Umpire Decision Review System), a technology normally used in cricket to assist the match officials with their decision making process in a situation that may demand to challenge the decision taken by an Umpire. Some of the advanced techniques used in DRS are Hawk-Eye or Virtual-Eye which is essentially a ball tracking technique that plots the trajectory of a bowling delivery that has been interrupted by the batsman, often by the pad, and can predict whether it would have hit the stumps. 

Snickometer or Ultra-Edge is used to identify whether a ball has really hit the bat or pad on realtime in a cricket match. Hot Spot is also a similar advanced technique which leverages infrared imaging system. Also, techniques like, Television Replays including Slow Motion Videos has been in use in the cricket matches for ages.

In 2011 Wimbledon Tennis Grandslam, an online scoreboard powered by IBMs PointStream technology has been used for the first time which identifies the play-pattern of a particular player in a particular set to predict the chances of a player to win over the other. Now the same can be achieved through IBM Watson Cognitive services. It considers parameters like ‘First Server Percentage’, ‘Rallies own in fewer than three strokes’ and ‘Ground Covered’ to do so. Similarly, Radar Gun is used to measure the serving speed of a particular player. It works on the principle of Doppler effect.

In Boxing - PIQ, a French sports robotics startup developed the first AI-powered wearable for combat sports crafted using GAIA Intelligence, a machine learning platform for sports analytics. This platform is capable of tracking and analyzing “Microscopic variations in boxing movements” to help maximize the efficiency of workouts and training.

India based Boltt Sports Technologies has forayed into the international market with it’s brand of AI powered wearable products like Connected Sneakers with an interconnected approach to its offerings which include fitness trackers and stride sensors.

Similarly, in National Basketball Association (NBA) a Chat Bot called KAI (Kings Artificial Intelligence) has been introduced which operates through the FaceBook messenger platform for the purpose of answering fan enquiries.

All these are just few examples of applications of AI and other technologies in different sports, the actual list will turn this article into a full-length book.   

AI and other cutting-edge technologies used in football & specially FIFA World Cup 2018: Now lets talk about Artificial Intelligence and some of the advanced sports technologies, many of those has been leveraged in FIFA World Cup Football 2018. 

Video refereeing with “Goal Line Technology(GLT)” can accurately pickup errors and mistakes whether a ball has crossed the goal line or not which human eye can’t due to positioning and blockage. Advanced GLT is AI powered and is far superior that has gained significant traction in last few years.

GDS (Goal Decisive System) is a special soccer ball invented by German company, Cairos Technology in collaboration with Adidas which sends out a beep sound from an embedded microchip installed inside the football into the referees’s headset so that referee can make a decision on whether the ball has crossed the goal line or not.

In FIFA World Cup 2014, a technologically advanced soccer ball named, Brazuca was introduced which had a latex bladder and many impressive features that made it the most scientifically perfect ball ever made in the history of football at that time. 

Telstar, the football used in FIFA World Cup 2018, also includes an embedded NFC(Near Field Communication) chip powered with AI, which enables consumers to interact with the ball using a smartphone and many more undisclosed advanced features. Isn’t it amazing !

Footbonaut is an advanced technique which helps training footballers to control and pass the ball instantaneously and effectively to another player in a simulated environment. Although training cost with Footbonaut is a bit on the higher side but the effectiveness of such a technique has proved to be very significant. It is said that one session of training using Footbonaut is equivalent to several weeks of rigorous passing training in the football ground.

“Astro Turf Football Fields” are amazing to play on and can be used throughout all types of weather which basically consists of plastic blades of grass that are filled with small, crumbly rubber like shavings. Although there is no rocket science used for building such fields but a significant amount of research have been carried out to build such weather resistant football fields which is commendable.

Computer Vision, a branch of Artificial Intelligence which uses Neural Networks has been extensively used in many applications in 2018 FIFA World Cup Football including Automated Video Highlights, Smart Ticketing, Fine-Grained control of cameras & devices and in many decision making and security applications. This is the very first time in the history of FIFA World Cup Football that such advanced AI technologies has been used so extensively.

The video assistant referee (VAR) is a football assistant referee who reviews decisions made by the head referee with the use of video footage and a headset for communication from the video operation room (VOR). In 2018, VARs were written into the Laws of the Game by the International Football Association Board (IFAB). The 2018 FIFA World Cup marked the VAR system's World Cup debut, with the first VAR decision at the World Cup came on 16 June 2018 in a group stage match between France and Australia, where referee Andres Cunha awarded a penalty to France after consulting with the VAR. Arguably VAR is now AI assisted which make it faster and much efficient.

Such advanced tools and techniques are not only observed inside the stadium but also prevailed outside the stadium in the areas like Automated Sports Journalism, Marketing, Promotion and even Sports Retails. 

AI has pushed the traditional sports journalism to a new era. AI algorithms can interrogate various data sources and can automate the conventional sports journalism to a great extent. Computer Vision Referee,  Fox Sports has tapped into the potential of AI and Machine Learning to deliver the innovative FIFA World Cup highlight machine available through it’s Fox Sports App and Fox sports dot com. In collaboration with IBM Watson, the highlight machine analyzes video from the FIFA World Cup archive as well as footage and extracts data allowing users to search for goals, read cards, players by name and the like etc. etc. This also helps analyzing enormous amount of audio and video data and generate captions help understanding what’s happening in that particular scene of the game.

Now the big question among experts and critics in the football world is- can Artificial Intelligence replace human referees in a football match? Well, the answer is No. At least not immediately because AI at in it’s present form cannot understand many of the field events and parameters which involves many emotional factors associated with the players that are very crucial for a referee to take any decision. But at the same time a group of researchers at University of Southampton are already building some Artificial Intelligence algorithms which will be able to understand those wider emotional factors and can help referees to take better decisions in future.

I hope this gives some insight on how advanced technologies like AI are increasingly proliferating in our sports world, like every other aspects of our life.