FIFA has announced Friday that “semi-automated” offside technology will be used at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
A combination of cameras in stadiums and a sensor placed inside the Al Rihla match ball will combine to send data to the VAR officials in a given match, who if alerted will manually check the position of the player and the timing of when the ball was struck before alerting the referee.
12 dedicated cameras are set to track the ball and as many as 29 data points on each individual player (including any body part that could trigger an offside call), recording the positions of all of them 50 times per second. The sensor in the ball records data 500 times per second to show exactly when the ball has been struck.
FIFA says “offside decisions can be made faster and more accurately” due to the program, which will also include instantly-generated 3D models that will be shown in stadiums and made available to broadcasters to show why the offside call has been made.
“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,” said former World Cup referee Pierluigi Collina, who now serves as chairman of the FIFA Referees Committee. “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.”
The system has been tested at the 2021 Club World Cup as well as the 2021 Arab Cup, and was analyzed by the MIT Sports Lab, with further scientific validation on the camera system coming from TRACK at Victoria University. Nonetheless, FIFA will continue testing in the four months between now and the World Cup itself “to fine-tune the system.”
Teams that qualified for the World Cup will learn more about the system in a presentation during a Team Workshop in Doha from July 4-5, with that presentation to be available to the public at a later date.
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