Coming soon a technology to automatically judge offside?

According to The Times, the Premier League and FIFA are happy with an experimental device that automates offside analysis during a match. The official use can take place at the end of 2022, on the occasion of the World Cup in Qatar.

What if intrusion was scanned automatically and almost instantly by AI? This technological novelty could arrive as early as 2022, according to information reported on Thursday times. The tests have already been conducted during the Premier League matches, at the stadium of one of the major clubs whose name has not been cleared. These tests, which the referees did not take advantage of, should continue next season, with Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United.

According to the British newspaper, the first results are very promising. The Premier League will not be against the application from the 2023-2024 season. FIFA, who would have also been testing the device during the Club World Cup in February, was impressed. So much so, that it will be suitable for official 2022 World Cup use in Qatar.

Great time savings

This automatic intrusion detection system will be primarily implemented by Hawk-Eye, which is already at the forefront of the Goal-line technology And video arbitration assistance (VAR). With just 0.5 seconds behind the game, the tool will work with cameras capable of perfectly styling soccer players’ bodies and automatically choosing the right image to judge offside. In particular, the tests will be used to see if the system should directly indicate to all referees that the attacker is at fault, or whether video judges should be allowed to analyze the particular image.

In any case, the time savings will be significant. According to the census TimesThree-quarters of the VAR goals rejected this season in the Premier League (29 out of 38) were for offside.

For now, the offside decided that using a VAR sometimes takes more than a minute to judge, given the time wasted in selecting the correct image and placing the engineering tools to the nearest centimeter. The cumbersome process which would be automated with the experimental process. However, it will not solve the frustration of rejecting targets caused by offside a few centimeters.