Football governance.
H.A.R.I. governs context, decisions, and authorization paths across the football operation — from VAR review to medical clearance to stadium safety. Architecture-ready. Pilot-ready when scoped and authorized.
Overview
Football is, structurally, a governance domain: every consequential action — a VAR review outcome, a referee designation, a medical clearance, a transfer registration, an evacuation phase change in a stadium — is bounded by rules, scoped to identified roles, and reviewable after the fact. It is exactly the shape of problem H.A.R.I. is engineered for.
The vertical reuses the same deterministic kernel, the same forensic chain, the same human-authority guarantees as every other vertical. What changes is the policy: the constraints encoded in the CL reflect the laws of the game, the federation's competition regulations, the league's operational rules, and the club's internal authorities.
What follows are the operational areas the vertical is engineered to govern. None of them require the platform to "decide football matters" autonomously. The platform reads context, evaluates policy, emits one of three states, and routes irreversible actions to the named humans whose authority cannot be delegated.
01VAR governance
VAR is governance work that happens to use video. The institutional question is not "did the model see the foul?" but "was the review process invoked correctly, by the right person, under the right policy, on the right protocol?" H.A.R.I. governs the process around the review.
The platform validates that a review request meets policy preconditions — the trigger, the protocol, the elapsed time, the scope of reviewable infractions. It records the inputs to each review event, the named officials, and the policy version. The review outcome itself is the human's call; the platform records the outcome, signs it into the chain, and makes it replayable.
H.A.R.I. is designed to integrate with authorized federation, league, and VAR-infrastructure systems when access is granted. It does not replace VAR. It governs VAR's authorization surface, audit surface, and post-match review surface.
02Referee governance & designation support
Referee designation involves constraints that are simple to state and intricate to combine: nationality and conflicts of interest, recent assignments and rest, competition-specific eligibility, fitness and certification status, and the federation's discretion. The platform encodes the hard constraints in the CL and the federation's named principal authorizes within the soft-discretion band.
Designation outputs are ALLOW (the candidate satisfies all hard constraints; designation may proceed), DEFER (a discretionary judgment is required from the named authority), or SYSTEM_UNVERIFIED (a precondition for evaluation is missing — for example, a stale fitness certification). The chain records the inputs, the policy version, the outcome, and the authorizing human.
03Match analysis
Match analysis here means context reading, not player profiling. Examples: was a substitution window respected; did a stoppage exceed the policy band; did the third officials' protocol execute under its preconditions; was an injury protocol observed within the time bound. The platform produces a deterministic record of the match's procedural fabric — the things a federation reviews when reviewing a match — and not a probabilistic summary of who played well.
04Tactical analysis
Tactical analysis is treated as formation context and adaptation pattern, not as judgment about individual players. The platform reads the formation declared, the adaptations across phases of play, and the deviation from the declared formation. It records context. It does not assess.
The institutional value is for federation review and operational continuity — a club's tactical staff and a federation's competition office both benefit from a deterministic record of "what shape did the team take and when did it change," which a probabilistic analyzer cannot give them with the same reproducibility.
05Athlete performance & load context
The platform reads load context and risk awareness signals — the operational facts that medical and performance staff use to make decisions. It does not profile individuals. It does not score players. It does not produce projections.
What it does: validate that authorized inputs (training load, recent match minutes, sensor signals from authorized devices) are within the policy band, surface where they are not, and route consequential decisions (rest, modification, removal from selection) to the named humans whose authority covers them. The medical and performance staff make the call. The platform makes the call auditable.
06Medical & return-to-play
Return-to-play is, by spec, an irreversible action under the Time Sovereignty Layer. The platform never produces a clearance. The named medical principal produces the clearance; the platform validates that policy preconditions are met (protocol completion, time-since-injury bands, sign-offs by named roles), routes the request to the medical principal under DEFER, captures their signed authorization, and writes both to the chain.
The institutional posture is conservative on intent. The vertical is engineered explicitly to avoid SaMD classification under EU MDR for the football medical workflow: H.A.R.I. is advisory only, the clinical decision is the named clinician's, and the platform's role is governance and audit. See the healthcare vertical for the detailed regulatory framing that applies analogously here.
07Transfers & squad composition
Transfers and squad registration are dense compliance domains: roster caps, homegrown quotas, third-party ownership rules, registration windows, financial fair play constraints, work-permit and nationality rules. The platform encodes the hard constraints in the CL. A proposed transfer or registration receives one of the canonical outputs: ALLOW if all hard constraints are satisfied; DEFER if a discretionary determination is required from the federation's named authority; SYSTEM_UNVERIFIED if an input precondition cannot be evaluated. The platform does not "recommend" transfers. It evaluates compliance.
08Academy & youth development
Youth contexts are protection-first by policy. The platform does not retain or process PII for under-18 individuals beyond the role-token mapping that governance requires. Authorization scopes for academy decisions are tighter than for senior squads. Irreversible decisions affecting under-18 individuals route through a stricter human-authority requirement and are flagged in the chain accordingly. The architectural commitment is that the platform's footprint in the academy context is minimal and visible.
09Smart glasses for officials
Smart-glass interfaces, where authorized, deliver the right information to the right person at the right moment in the right role — and nothing else. The platform's role is to govern the information delivered, not to produce surveillance.
What the glasses receive: the authorized informational payload bound to the role and moment (fourth official's substitution data, medical staff's protocol step, stadium safety lead's evacuation phase). What the glasses do not receive: identity payloads, facial-recognition outputs, profiling signals. The architectural posture is treated in detail on Smart glasses & field interfaces.
10Stadium safety & emergency coordination
Stadium safety is situational risk reading — crowd flow, density gradients, evacuation phase coordination, emergency response sequencing — not surveillance of attendees. The platform reads context from authorized inputs, evaluates policy, and routes phase changes to the named human authorities (stadium safety lead, club, stewards, medical, emergency operators).
For the cross-vertical detail on the safety architecture — phases, role-based information delivery, coordination with stewards and emergency response — see Critical infrastructure & stadium safety.
11Fan loyalty & SLAM XP integration
The platform's fan-side surface is engagement-via-dormant-value-activation through SLAM XP. It is not a profiling product. SLAM XP routes governed value (vouchers, sponsor-funded benefits, territorial programs) to fans under the Five-Win constraint and the SCINTILLA push-only model — never to extract data about fans, never to build profiles, never to score them.
For the full mechanics — IX Algorithm, POL Protocol, voucher lifecycle, SCINTILLA — see SLAM XP.
H.A.R.I. does not profile people. It reads context, preserves human judgment, and helps teams understand when a process is coherent, fragile, or unsafe.
Status
The football vertical is architecture-validated for the use cases above and pilot-ready when scoped and authorized. Where federation, league, club, or VAR-infrastructure access has not been granted, that is plainly stated: H.A.R.I. is designed to integrate with authorized systems, APIs and data sources when access is granted. No deployment claim is made beyond what authorization permits.
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