According to The Athletic, the English top-flight football league is observing and evaluating the application prospects of goal-line chip technology in official matches.
Connected Ball technology embeds sensors inside the ball, which can identify the precise moment the ball is touched, providing more data for offside, handball, deflection, and double touch penalties.
Multiple sources, speaking anonymously to The Athletic, said league representatives observed the technology at the FIFA Women's Champions Cup in London this January and at the Wings Cup youth tournament in RB Leipzig in 2025, using Puma match balls. However, the system has not yet been tested in official matches in the English top flight.
La Liga will become the first national professional football league this season to fully deploy Connected Ball technology in every match. La Liga's system uses radio frequency sensors developed by the German technology company KINEXON Sports and is integrated with the Puma match ball; data is transmitted to approximately 12 antennas installed in each stadium.
Sources added that the Premier League currently has no immediate plans to introduce Connected Ball technology. The existing semi-automatic offside system can determine whether the ball has been kicked without on-ball sensors, but the league will continue to monitor the technology's adoption elsewhere.
The Premier League's current system relies on optical tracking, using up to 30 cameras around each stadium to track the ball and record thousands of data points for each player. It then provides touch point suggestions and automatically generates offside lines for VAR.
When the Premier League introduces this system in April 2025, it states that sensors inside the ball are unnecessary because optical tracking is sufficient to determine whether the ball has been kicked. The chip inside the ball will provide another independent measurement at the moment of contact.
Connected Ball technology has been used with Adidas match balls in several major international sporting events, including the 2022 and 2026 Men's World Cups, the 2023 Women's World Cup, the 2024 European Championship, the 2025 Women's European Championship, and the 2025 Club World Cup.
This technology can also be seen in the World Cup this summer, including Croatia's last-minute equalizer against Portugal in the round of 32, which was disallowed: the system detected that the ball touched striker Igor Matanovic first during the attack before falling to midfielder Mario Pasalic, who was in an offside position.
Starting from the 2025-26 season, Puma will replace Nike as the official match ball supplier for the Premier League, and Puma is also the official match ball supplier for La Liga.
