Explained: Why the 2022 World Cup will feature semi-automated offside technology

Welcome to FIFA’s new age — the red-letter day when the robots take (partial) charge.

This morning (Friday), FIFA confirmed it will roll out semi-automated offside technology during the 2022 World Cup finals.

For the first time at football’s greatest showpiece, artificial intelligence will effectively dictate whether attacking players are on or offside and — the important bit — do it all in real-time.

No more waiting around for a flesh and blood Video Assistant Referee to draw those lines on paused images of the action. No further delays.

The technology was first trialled at the Arab Cup last November, during an otherwise unremarkable 5-1 win for Tunisia over Mauritania. It also featured during Chelsea’s triumph at the Club World Cup in February.

Very little has changed in its implementation since.

At every venue, there will be between 10 and 12 specialist cameras hung from the roofs of grandstands. They are there to follow the movement of all 22 players and, via limb-tracking technology, collect 29 data points per player 50 times every second.

A tracking device in the centre of the ball will also beam its location to the VAR room 500 times per second.

That all means that when an offside decision needs to be made, image-processing algorithms can provide a clear picture of events almost immediately. This, in turn, is relayed to the human VAR, who is then tasked with making the final offside decision for the officials out on the pitch.

One of the major gripes of match-going fans will also be addressed — the crucial still picture the call is based on will be displayed on the big screen inside the stadium.

This is FIFA’s new baby and a bold new step in the development of VAR.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who watched the system’s debut at the Arab Cup, has accepted the imperfections of VAR but made it a central part of his action plan for the sport — The Vision 2020-23 — to oversee improvements in the technology.

The feeling is that to avoid damaging the product (aka, the game out on the grass), the decision-making process via VAR must be quicker.

“We expect that semi-automated offside technology can take us a step further,” explained the famous former ref Pierluigi Collina, who is now chairman of FIFA’s referees committee, on Friday.

“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.”

It is a significant shift in football’s use of technology.

Throughout the four years since VARs were first used at a World Cup, during Russia 2018, significant time has always been required for them to manually draw the calibrated lines that help assess potential offsides.

There have been variations on the theme, including the thickening of said lines to give greater benefit of the doubt to attacking players in the Premier League last season, but a laboured process has never accelerated beyond an average wait of 70 seconds per incident.

It has felt disruptive, is routinely time-consuming, and, as Collina accepts, even after all that is not always 100 per cent reliable.

Television’s frames per second rate does not totally lend itself to VAR accuracy and cannot promise to provide a still of the exact moment when the forward pass begins — the point on which offside decisions hang. This semi-automated offside technology, in theory, can.

“The focus is always on two aspects,” said FIFA’s football technology and innovation director Johannes Holzmuller.

“The first one is the kick point — we hope that, with the help of technology, we can identify exactly the moment the ball is played.

“The second point is that we can identify which body part of the attacker or the second-last defender is closer to the goalline. We hope, with the help of technology, we can be more accurate, and faster.”

Despite this push for more clarity, there will still be subjective caveats. Was a particular attacking player interfering with play, for example?

That is why the emphasis is placed on the “semi” of semi-automated.

Artificial intelligence will build a better picture through those dozen cameras mentioned earlier but the robots still need a human to make the decision.

An assistant VAR, working alongside the lead VAR, will staff a dedicated offside station for every game at the World Cup this November and December. Their only job will be to view those marginal offside calls, using the images provided by the new software.

So, how soon could this system be seen in the Premier League, too?

As with VAR’s introduction at the 2018 World Cup, the major domestic leagues are likely to follow FIFA’s lead.

The earliest season that could see semi-automated offside decisions in the Premier League, however, is 2023-24.

The sport could look very different without assistant referees legging it up and down touchlines, but the International Football Association Board (IFAB), governors of football’s laws, and FIFA stress that won’t be the case.

Semi-automated offsides are primarily deemed to be a means of speeding up the decision-making process but will only be a crutch to support a referee and their two assistants down either touchline. Their human judgement on matters that cannot be computed by even cutting-edge software remains essential for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlDHJxzb7nE

“Technology, today or tomorrow, can draw a line, but the assessment of interfering with play or with an opponent remains in referees’ hands,” Collina said last year. “The involvement of the referees in the assessment of offside remains crucial and final.”

But FIFA’s chief of global football development, former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, has not always agreed with that stance.

“The semi-automated judgement goes first to the VAR, who signals it to the linesman,” Wenger said last year. “I’m pushing very hard to have the automated offsides — which means straight away the signal goes to the linesman.”

The beauty of semi-automated offside, FIFA believe, will be that fans are unaware of the process functioning. Stoppages will not be necessary and definitive answers on whether or not a player was offside will come far faster.

The robots are here and, according to FIFA, they want to be football’s friends.

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