Live match data is something the second tier of women’s football rarely gets anywhere. From next month it will be standard in Spain, and it will come from a watch on the referee’s wrist.
Primera Federación — the division below Liga F — begins its season on 13 September, and it will do so with ATR, the Spanish federation’s new real-time match reporting system. Officials will record goals, cards, substitutions and other significant incidents on a smartwatch as the match is being played, and the information will reach the RFEF’s public channels without waiting for the paperwork.
The federation has set that date for the women’s second tier and has issued it 24 devices.
What the watch does, and what it does not
ATR was built by Novanet and is wired into the RFEF’s electronic match report. The data appears on Marcadores.RFEF.es, the federation’s official platform, which carries fixtures, results, match reports, tables and disciplinary records for more than fifty national competitions across football, futsal and beach soccer.
It is not a review system. It has nothing to do with VAR and it does not touch a single refereeing decision: it records what has already been given and publishes it faster.
Nor does it make anything final. The federation has been explicit that everything logged during a match is provisional until the referee reviews and closes the report, which remains the official document. The watch shortens the gap between an incident and its publication; it does not remove the checking that follows.
The women’s tier goes third
The rollout order is worth reading closely.
ATR starts this weekend in the men’s Primera Federación. Segunda Federación follows on 5 and 6 September. The women’s Primera Federación comes a week after that, on 13 September — the day its own season starts, so it is not a case of the competition waiting for the technology.
Of the 209 watches distributed for this first phase, 61 go to the men’s Primera Federación, 124 to Segunda Federación and 24 to the women’s second tier, with ten more held back as replacements. Spain’s top two men’s divisions are due to follow once Primera Federación has played three or four rounds.
The platform and the technology were presented in December 2025, at an extraordinary general assembly in Las Rozas. Referee training on the device was scheduled for 25 August.
Following a division that is hard to follow
None of this is a broadcast. Nobody will see the goals; they will see that the goals happened.
That still matters in a division where, until now, following a match from anywhere other than the ground has largely meant waiting. The change is not in how these games are refereed but in how they can be watched from a distance — and from 13 September, what happens in Spain’s women’s second tier will travel from a referee’s wrist to a screen while the match is still going on.
