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Computers may have helped France win the 1998 World Cup. The French
government’s director of sports is filing an international patent on a
computer-assisted football training system (WO 98/32100). During crucial moments
of goalmouth action, the players are filmed by a network of digital cameras that
generate data logging each player’s position and movement against time. The
recordings are then merged to build a three-dimensional image of the pitch area,
with the true position of each player and the ball. This image lets the team’s
coach analyse at his leisure what the players did right or wrong.