There have long been debates about offside in football even before Video Assistant Referee (VAR) was put in place. Many people in the past have been in favor of giving the attacker the benefit of the doubt when the margins around an offside call are extremely tight.
But surely an increase of objectivity within the game is only a benefit for the sport, be it by a single inch or by meters, offside is offside no matter how small a margin may be. However, the use of VAR to judge offside decisions that have been utilized across Europe's major leagues has had major flaws and could now transform similar to the development of goal-line technology following Frank Lampard's goal that never was at the 2010 World Cup.
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England is one of the favorites at this year's World Cup, offered as one of the main favorites at odds of +800 to be the World champions. Whether you're rooting for the Three Lions or the Maple Leafs this year, you can enjoy sports betting Canada from your mobile wherever you are.
The Lions will want as fair a competition as possible this time around, having had much experience with the Premier League's use of VAR to judge offsides. where England is World Cup fever is fast gripping the entire nation of Canada as the Maple Leafs prepare to participate in their first competition since 1986.
The initial use of technology to judge whether a player is onside or not has involved the manual drawing of lines based on a frame from television footage from the moment the ball leaves the assister's boot. This is an approach that is not completely accurate as the frame rate of TV Cameras is just 50 frames per second.
Drawing the line manually to judge offside means that the frame in which the ball was struck a player is inaccurate, so a computer judging the offside decision based on the selected frame is automatically going to result in a slightly skewed result.
What is Semi-Automated Technology
There will be cameras set up underneath all of the World Cup stadium's roofs. All 22 players on the pitch at one time will be tracked effectively by these cameras, which capture data points to determine each player's exact location on the field.
The technology can pinpoint a player's precise location at any time as there are data points linking to all body parts that are critical for an offside ruling - which is essentially every part of the body besides the lower arm. The ball will also have a sensor inside so it can be tracked in real-time constantly to award accurate offside decisions without a significant wait.
As all players are tracked in real-time by artificial intelligence, referees and linesmen will not be required to necessarily identify possible offsides themselves as the system will trigger an alert in case of a potential offside decision. In this case, the VAR official can verify the automatic lines drawn are accurate and report to the referee that a decision needs to be made.
The overall aim is to make the judging of offsides completely objective similar to how goal-line technology is seen. Offside decisions in many European leagues can often dominate the headlines over the actual football that has taken place in a game due to the uncertainty surrounding decisions made manually by VAR.
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But with this fresh technology, offside decisions could potentially turn into binary decisions. If this technology is successful then a player is either offside or not and fans can trust and accept that as a fact regardless of the margin, be it insignificant or not.
FIFA's head of refereeing, Pierluigi Collina says that the AI technology will reduce the length of VAR checks to between 15-25 seconds, and previously for offsides they have averaged 70 seconds. This is huge for fans within the stadium and watching at home, as less time is spent waiting for decisions to be made, and the action can continue quickly.
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