AI technology in soccer: Hands off the handball!
The national coach hopes that artificial intelligence will help with handball decisions in soccer. It's hopeless: AI won't solve the problem either.
The hand on the ball flying towards the goal: This can also be determined without AI. In the end, it's always up to humans to decide what to do with this information.
(Image: UEFA, Bearbeitung durch heise online)
Soccer fans like to moan. Especially about refereeing decisions: When Joachim Andersen's offside toe was overturned with millimeter precision through the use of technology, Danish fans were unhappy. Technology is ruining the sport! Meanwhile, the fact that Marc Cucurella's Spanish backhand later made it at least difficult for the German national team to progress was poorly received in this country. More technique could have prevented that! German coach Julian Nagelsmann agrees, recognizing technical progress as a partial solution to the eternal handball dilemma. It's a well-intentioned but futile attempt: not even AI can cope with the handball rule.
In principle, it is right to use technology where it makes the sport more predictable and fairer. UEFA's semi-automated offside detection shows as objectively as possible that the Dane Andersen's feet are simply too big for a European Championship quarter-final. The fact that the precise offside edge causes the disadvantaged players and fans grief is as understandable as it is irrelevant: people are always complaining anyway. UEFA's offside technology makes the sport fairer and less error-prone. Just like goal-line technology, which has been deciding whether a goal is scored or not for years in the Bundesliga.
Human judgment
However,anyone wishing for a parallel handball technique fails to recognize the intricacies of this unruly soccer rule. Offside, goal line - it's binary. Yes or no, over or not. The handball rule is not binary in all conceivable interpretations, but is always open to interpretation. That is why the associations have never been able to get a complete handle on it in over 150 years of soccer history.
And that's how it remains. Because no matter how much you twist and turn the handball rules: Technology alone will not fix it. An acceleration sensor in the ball can determine beyond doubt whether the ball has been touched. But the sensor does not know whether the arm has deliberately moved towards the ball. It has no idea whether the arm was leaning, whether it was a "natural movement" of the defender and whether the defender would have had time to pull his hand out of the field of fire. However, depending on the interpretation of the rules, all of this can be decisive in the assessment. At the end of the day, there must inevitably be a person who evaluates the overall picture and ultimately decides according to his best judgment.
Desire for clear answers
At best, technology can provide data points that help slightly with the assessment - as the motion sensor in the ball already does, for example. Julian Nagelsmann probably sees it that way too. In the aftermath of the Spain game, however, the national coach called for additional AI-supported trajectory calculations. Artificial intelligence should therefore determine whether a shot would have been on target or a cross would have found the desired recipient. This would probably be feasible with a great deal of effort - but can just as easily be assessed by a human.
Referee Anthony Taylor may very well have noticed that Jamal Musiala did not kick the ball into Stuttgart's city center, but roughly towards the goal net. If this were relevant for the assessment according to UEFA rules, Taylor could have pointed to the spot even without technical support. But that wasn't the case at this tournament. Incidentally, the hypothetical trajectory AI cannot answer whether the handball even prevented a goal: the behavior of human goalkeepers is notoriously unpredictable.
No technology in the world could have changed Taylor's mind, and no AI could have interpreted the scene more fairly. Not even the refereeing experts agree on whether a penalty should have been awarded for Cucurella's hand-block. Handball is often debatable, ambiguous and dependent on the angle of vision. There are rarely clear answers. That's unsatisfactory, but the AI won't save us from it. We humans will have to deal with it on our own.
At least we can moan about it together.
(dahe)
