Handball or not? Now a special football will have the answer at Euro 2024 | Football News

In order to help officials be more accurate in handball decisions during Euro 2024, the official ball manufacturers Adidas have installed a microchip inside the ball that helps to determine whether there has been a handball in the lead-up to a goal, a report from The Times, London stated.“The tech will be providing unprecedented insight into every element of the movement of the ball and contributing to UEFA’s video assant refereeing (VAR) decision-making process,” UEFA said in a statement.
How does it work?
The microchip installed in the ‘Fussballliebe’, the official match ball of the Euros, will work together with limb-tracking technology that enables the real-time creation of 3D visual representations of players’ skeletons, as per The Times.

😍#EURO2024 pic.twitter.com/TRDbWSQlrX
— UEFA EURO 2024 (@EURO2024) December 1, 2023
The video assant referee (VAR) will then use the device’s data to create an image, which will accurately establish the point of contact of the ball with the body.
The chip also allows the technology to determine the exact time the ball was kicked, which will provide an accurate result when it comes to offside decisions.
Is it different from the semi-automated offside system?
At last year’s World Cup, FIFA had used this chip-in-the ball tech to govern the offside decisions but it hasn’t yet found a way to the Champions League, which still uses the semi-automated offside system. In layman’s terms it means that the UCL officials use cameras and artificial intelligence to create 3D models of a player’s position in real time, which improves the accuracy of the kick point. Meanwhile, a player’s skeleton is modelled to identify which part of his/her body is furthest forward.
The chip-in-the-ball system hasn’t yet found a way into the UCL because of it being a costlier alternative to the semi-automated offside system.
UEFA’s chief refereeing officer Roberto Rosetti had recently said that the semi-automated offside system has enabled VAR teams to determine offside situations quickly and more precisely. “The system is working very well in terms of accuracy and faster decision-making,” he explained. “Offside is no longer an issue for us,” he said.

introducing the official match ball for the @EURO2024 – this is ⚽️
find it here: https://t.co/xyNZl37OLQ pic.twitter.com/MXxUABb47j
— adidas Football (@adidasfootball) November 15, 2023
Handball rules
According to the law set the International Football Association Board (IFAB), it’s a handball if a player “touches the ball with their hand/arm when it has made their body unnaturally bigger. A player is considered to have made their body unnaturally bigger when the position of their hand/arm is not a consequence of, or justifiable , the player’s body movement for that specific situation. having their hand/arm in such a position, the player takes a risk of their hand/arm being hit the ball and being penalised.”
But when it comes to accidental handballs like deflections off the body, there are considerable grey areas on what constitutes a penalty or a foul.
Recently, Premier League club Newcastle found that out the hard way when Paris Saint Germain’s Ousmane Dembele’s flighted ball first hit the Magpies’ defender Timo Livramento on his knee before contacting his arm. The referee gave a penalty and PSG cancelled out Newcastle’s goal with the match ending in a draw. The debate here will rage on as a group will say it was the correct decision due to Livramento’s arm being in an unnatural position while another group will say that it wasn’t so because the ball had previously deflected off his body.

But according to the new Premier League guidelines that came into being for the 2020-21 season, if the ball hits a player’s arm directly from the player’s own head or body or if a player is falling and their arm is between themselves and the ground for support that will not result in a penalty, as per the BBC.
As the controversy continued, Polish VAR Tomasz Kwiatkowski who had been pivotal to the penalty decision was ultimately removed UEFA indicating their stand on the decision.
With a lot of discussions still ongoing on what constitutes a handball in the game, the microchip-enhanced Fussballliebe will have its work cut out for them in the upcoming Euros.