Soccer is increasingly a game refereed by digital technology
FIFA has announced it will be using new offside technology at the World Cup in Qatar that will use a sensor on the ball and tracking of 29 points on the body of each player, which will be followed fifty times per second by a series of twelve cameras and monitored by an algorithm that will determine their relative position on the field.
The technology is defined as semi-automatic: it replaces the current manual drawing of lines in the VOR room, which was laborious and caused annoying delays to the game. It joins a number of other technologies, such as VAR or the hawk eye on goal lines, which provide greater accuracy, or based on the referee’s assistants on the line, who are not always in the best position.
The sensor in the ball is an inertial measurement unit or IMU located inside it that transmits its location on the field 500 times per second. The data it generates, together with the real-time transmission of the players’ positions determined by the 29 points on each player, will, according to the organization, not only reduce the time needed to make a decision from the current average of 75 seconds — sometimes considerably more — to 25, but also generate diagrams that can be displayed on a screen in real time.
