"It's tracking based on hardcoded colours. Try this on a video with even the slightest colour variation, and it will fall apart."

How would you improve it? (Serious question.) Some sort of training data set of many different footballs from many different games? It's easy to offer criticism without also offering how this could improve.

I personally think this kind of thing could be the future of television - heavy in-game analysis for sports stat nerds.

At the moment football (i.e. soccer) teams pay a lot of money to get stats on their own players[1] (distance ran, passes complete, assists, etc, etc). This kind of thing could lower the cost of gathering this data. I'm not an expert in the area, but I read somewhere that at the moment at least some stats are gathered manually (guy sitting in the stands.) It would be of particular interest to clubs doing the whole soccernomics thing (idea adopted from "Moneyball" in US baseball). Some clubs practicing soccernomics: Liverpool in England and Lyon in France [2]. Could be a serious startup opportunity here!

[1] http://www.optasports.com/sports/football.html

[2] See this book for more: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soccernomics-England-Germany-Austral...

A fascinating book to read as the World Cup nears:

http://www.amazon.com/Soccernomics-Australia-Turkey-Iraq-Are...