How the English Premier League plans to use 28+ iPhone 14 or newer cameras at stadiums to call offsides later in the 2024/25 season, ditching its VAR system
Later this season, the UK's top soccer division will replace its controversial VAR offside-detection system in favor of a whole bunch of Apple's smartphones.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Premier League’s move follows FIFA’s earlier adoption of semi-automated offside technology using 12 cameras and a custom ball at the 2022 World Cup. That established multi-camera player tracking as a viable officiating model; this deployment tests whether a larger array of consumer devices can supply the capture layer instead.
The significance is less the presence of automation than the hardware choice: Apple phones become part of stadium operations rather than merely a fan-facing or production tool.
First-order effects
- The Premier League and its stadium operators must install, position, synchronize, and maintain more than 28 qualifying iPhones per venue for offside decisions later in the season.
- Offside review shifts away from the league’s existing VAR detection setup to an iPhone-based camera array, directly changing the workflow and equipment used by match officials.
Second-order effects
- The change substitutes a distributed fleet of commodity devices for a more specialized sensing setup, making device management, calibration, networking, and replacement central operational requirements.
- It gives Apple a high-visibility professional-sports use case, while suppliers of dedicated tracking hardware face a clearer comparison with phone-based capture systems.
Third-order effects
- If the approach proves reliable, sports-tech buyers may increasingly separate image capture hardware from officiating software, allowing camera arrays to be refreshed or scaled without replacing an entire decision system.
- The broader constraint will remain trust: automated calls can become more modular, but leagues will still need transparent review processes to secure acceptance from clubs, players, and fans.
The trend: Professional sports are moving toward software-defined officiating systems that can draw tracking data from increasingly flexible, commodity camera hardware.