Footballs at the European Championships in 2024 will be fitted with microchips to help with offside and handball decisions, according to a report.

The Times report that the official match ball for Euro 2024 will contain a microchip allowing technology to determine the exact moment a ball was kicked or hit, aiding with various VAR decisions.

The primary use of the technology will be for semi-automated offsides.

Limb-tracking cameras around every stadium will keep a constant watch on any player who might stray into an offside position, but this is obviously only half of the story.

In order to determine whether an offside offence has been committed, you have to know whether the player was offside or not at the exact moment the ball was played.

The microchip in the ball provides us with that data, much more accurately than simply looking at two broadcast frames.

The microchip technology has already been used on the biggest stage, as it was utilised at the World Cup last winter.

But it hasn’t been used in other competitions with semi-automated offside technology yet, with the Champions League still using a different system where the contact point is determined by technology that interpolates between the frames of the footage.

The microchip in the ball is more expensive, hence why it hasn’t been introduced in the Champions League yet. But it should also be more reliable.

The technology was even used to definitively determine that Cristiano Ronaldo hadn’t made contact with the ball for one of Portugal’s goals at the World Cup, and that brings us to another potential advantage of the microchip system.

With the ability to determine exactly when a player makes contact with the ball, combined with the limb-tracking cameras, we should be able to reliably determine whether or not the ball has made contact with a player’s hand.

In the vast majority of cases, this technology isn’t needed. You can see whether the ball hit a hand, it’s just a question of whether or not it was deliberate, and so on.

But in some cases, it’s hard to tell using just the cameras whether or not there was contact between an arm and the ball. The microchip and the cameras should be able to give us the answer.

For fans, the biggest advantage of semi-automated offsides is that we should get more accurate decisions more quickly, with UEFA reporting in The Times’ article that their semi-automated system has more than halved the length of offside reviews.

The microchip in the ball should bring that number down even further.

The Times report that the Premier League are expected to bring in semi-automated offside technology next season.

If the use of the chip at the European Championship proves successful, we’ll hopefully see the same technology introduced in club football before long too.