FIFA, football’s international governing body, said the technology will be used at the tournament in Qatar as ‘a support tool for the video match officials and on-field officials’.
The semi-automated offside technology builds on VAR (video assistant referee) technology that was introduced at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.
In a statement, Pierluigi Collina, chairman of the FIFA Referees Committee, said: “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.”
The new system uses 12 tracking cameras mounted underneath the roof of the stadium to track the ball and up to 29 data points of each player, calculating their exact position on the pitch 50 times per second. The 29 collected data points are said to include all limbs and extremities that are relevant for making offside decisions.
An inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor positioned in the centre of the match ball will send data to the video operation room 500 times per second.
FIFA said that by combining the limb-and ball-tracking data and applying AI, the new technology provides an automated alert to the video match officials inside the video operation room whenever the ball is received by an attacker who was in an offside position at the moment the ball was played by a team-mate.
Before informing the on-field referee, the video match officials validate the proposed decision by manually checking the automatically selected ‘kick point’ and the automatically created offside line, which is based on the calculated positions of the players’ limbs.
After the decision has been confirmed by the video match officials and the referee on the pitch, the same positional data points that were used to make the decision will be generated into a 3D animation that details the position of the players’ limbs at the moment the ball was played. This 3D animation will then be shown on giant screens in the stadium.
Semi-automated offside technology and the connected ball technology have been trialled at test events and FIFA tournaments, including the FIFA Arab Cup 2021 and the FIFA Club World Cup 2021.
More tests are planned before the World Cup kicks off in November 2022 to fine-tune the system before a global standard is applied.
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