FIFA has announced that semi-automated offside technology will be used at the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar starting on 21 November, offering a support tool for the video match officials and the on-field officials to help them make faster, more accurate and more reproducible offside decisions on the biggest stage of all.
Following the successful use of VAR technology at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, FIFA President Gianni Infantino declared in The Vision 2020-23 that FIFA would strive to harness the full potential of technology in football and further enhance VAR.
FIFA’s head of refereeing Pierluigi Collina announced the news in a press conference on Thursday, saying it will lead to “faster and more accurate decision making.”
“VAR has already had a very positive impact on football and we can see that the number of major mistakes has already been dramatically reduced. We expect that semi-automated offside technology can take us a step further. We are aware that sometimes the process to check a possible offside takes too long, especially when the offside incident is very tight. This is where semi-automated offside technology comes in – to offer faster and more accurate decisions,” Collina said.
The technology uses 12 cameras positioned around the stadium’s roof to track player’s movements, using 29 data points per player to make a 3-D virtual model of the match.
It tracks the player’s limbs to make these data points 50 times every second. The cameras also track the ball’s position, although there is also a sensor inside the Qatar 2022 official match ball that records the exact moment the ball is kicked.
Artificial intelligence then puts all this data together to generate an offside line and automatically alerts the video match officials in the video assistant referee (VAR) room when a player receives a ball in an offside position.
The video match officials then check manually and let the referee on the pitch know whether a player is offside.
Fans will get to see the reason for the decision with a short 3D animation shown on TV and the big screens.
