And one other footballing - or at least, football-related - contest has been lined up in the Welsh capital.

Cardiff University is partnering the HYPE Foundation - a global platform connecting and investing in sports innovation - for an event at Cardiff Business School’s high-tech Postgraduate Teaching Centre that will involve ten companies competing in a "Dragon’s Den" type competition.

The pitch for this final will be directed at an international jury including senior representatives of UEFA, FC Barcelona, Adidas, Amazon and Microsoft.

The challenge will be to champion the best and most innovative technological addition to the "Beautiful Game" - whether that involves improving how it is played or how it is enjoyed.

Software that helps coaches manage matches, a device that hones players’ passing skills and an app for fan-led lightshows are among 10 start-up ideas that will be on show in the self-styled Sports Innovation Final.

Participants include VIKTRE, a social networking site for three million current and former athletes, and Exerlights - the first tool to control training in real-time with LED-lights.

Globall Coach will also join the challenge tomorrow in Cardiff. Adopted by the Football Association of Wales, Globall Coach allowed Wales manager Chris Coleman and his staff to visualise instructions, creating tactical animations that play with a click of a button on a big screen.

The software helped improve the team’s win ratio by 25 per cent, driving them to the semi-finals of UEFA Euro 2016 - the team’s first major tournament campaign for 58 years.

Bernd Wahler, ex-Adidas chief marketing officer, VfB StuttgartPresident who will chair the jury, said: "The quality of the startups is outstanding. We all want to maintain the beauty of the fascinating game and at the same time welcome meaningful and exciting innovations. That’s what this event is all about: showing the world the future of football."

Other pitches involved include a FanPictor’s app for fan engagement and crowd-led lightshows - “Turn every smartphone into a sea of light” - and a Formalytics’ ‘My Kicks’ app for measuring the speed, spin and flight of a football.

"Simply film your kick using your smartphone" say the app creators, "and receive instant feedback on your kicking speed, accuracy and curve using our world first technology. Track and record your kicking stats and measure your improvement over time. Visualise your best kicks and share with your friends for bragging rights."

Also in contention will be Socios Sports’ sports visualisation software, and a passing and peripheral vision trainer called Elite Skills Arena.

Amir Raveh, HYPE Foundation's chief executive, said: “We’ve had a huge number of start-ups applying with great innovations including wearable tech, analytics, fan engagement and broadcasting. It’s a fitting warm-up for the UEFA Champions League Finals."

Enterprises such as this week’s demonstrate that football is fizzing with technological enterprise in areas of fan engagement and coaching, yet, as a whole, it still appears conflicted over how far it should employ the eager reach of the app.

At the heart of the resistance is an instinctive fear within many of the game’s protagonists, whether players, coaches, managers or administrators, that technology will serve to rob the game of its vital appeal, to slow it down, to allow the geeks and boffins backstage to have the final say.

It was this mindset which helped create the moment of quintessential absurdity at the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals - the shot by England’s Frank Lampard in the match against Germany that was not given as a goal despite clearly bouncing down more than a foot behind the line.

"Thanks very much Sepp Blatter," said the co-commentator as the instant replays on the English television broadcast showed the ball landing deep inside the goal from two different angles. "I hope he’s here watching and squirming in his seat."

England ended up losing 4-1, but the controversy that ensued was instrumental in FIFA’s decision to introduce goal-line technology for Brazil 2014 and Lampard later reflected that he was happy the incident had a positive influence in the game as it finally jolted football’s top brass into installing the technology to prevent such an occurrence happening again by the time of the 2014 World Cup finals.

"It changed the game for the better, so I'm pleased about that,"said Lampard. "It's a positive move for the game as a whole with the introduction of goal-line technology"

The conflicted nature of the game persists, however. For instance, it has taken the Football Association seven years to decide that the Scottish League’s 2011 initiative in introducing retrospective one or two-match bans for players adjudged to have dived or feigned injury was worth adopting in England - it will start next season.

And with England and Scotland having permanent seats on FIFA's law-making body, the International Football Association Board, bans for divers could soon become a worldwide policy.

Meanwhile, another major international sport, tennis, is daily demonstrating its own conflicted nature with regard to technology as fans and viewers are daily presented with the curiously olde worlde spectacle of umpires relinquishing their perches and climbing laboriously down to the court in order to inspect contentious smudges of critical importance upon the red clay courts of the Stade Roland Garros in its annual hosting of the French Open.

All the other Grand Slam tournaments - the Australian and US Opens, and, glory be, even Wimbledon - have adopted the video technology of the Hawk-Eye system to determine whether shots have landed in or out.

It is true that clay courts, which can be topped with swirling dust or sludge depending on the conditions, and which shift fundamentally in the way that the hard courts or grass courts of the others do not, present a singular problem for the technology that has been effectively in operation for the last decade.

But, Hawk-Eye’s champions insist, it is not an insuperable problem. Indeed, the technology is already installed in some of the larger Roland Garros courts but used only as a back-up for television commentary.

Interviewed last year by the estimable Christopher Clarey for the New York Times, Jeremy Botton, the French Open’s newly installed chief executive, offered his view on Roland Garros continuing to be the Odd Slam Out: "On clay, it’s easy, there is the mark, and it’s easy to see if the ball is in or out. It’s also a point of difference, which we like. I don’t see why we’d change it."

Vive la difference, eh M Botton? I’d give it three years max.