As the FIFA World Cup 2022 has been started in Qatar with total 64 matches to be played in the whole tournament amongst 32 International team from across the globe, the last thing fans want to witness is the game to be stooped for penalties, Hopefully the latest nifty technology in FFIA’s will help a lot during all the upcoming matches.

The International Federation of Football has announced that there will be a new technology introduced for the first time in this FIFA World Cup called “Semi Automated Offside Technology” to check and verify if any player is offside or not without wasting a lot of time in manual reviews and checks held by the referees. For those fans who are not experts of footballs rules, this new technology will help in checking the rule which states that a player attacking on the opponent team’s goal cannot be closer to the goal than the ball and the second closest opponent team player.

In other words, if there is only the goalkeeper between you and the goal and you do not have the ball, you are offside. It’s the kind of thing that regularly stops play and can be difficult to determine because it only takes half an inch of knee to be closer to the goal than his opponent for it to be considered offside. FIFA’s shopping mode installs 12 dedicated tracking cameras around stadiums (and places a sensor inside the ball itself) to measure both player positions and ball positions.

When this new technology detects that an offside penalty has occurred, the guys in the video ops room get an alert, take a few seconds to check it and report it to the referees on the field. Once confirmed by all parties, a 3D animation showing the offside is created on the fly before being shown to the people in the stands and those watching on TV at home.

To be honest, fans can’t wait for one of these 3D animations to go horribly wrong and show a guy’s knee where his head should be or something like this.

Even though if you are not a big fan of football, the key benefits of this new technology is very much clear. Those fans who wake up at during mid-night on weekends just to watch English football keep getting pissed off about the “Video Assistant Referee (VAR)” system currently in place to review calls. This practice not only slows down the game, but also relying on referees to review frame by frame to check these rules can also sometimes question the decisions of referees made manually without using any technology.

A recent study and research in 2021 revealed that only 26% percent of the English Premier League (EPL) which currently one of the biggest soccer leagues supported the use of Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system, but on the other hand 74% percent of English football fans agreed that it will be a real feat. It is hoped that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and clear visual data to determine offside will eliminate many of the problems associated with Video Assistant Referee (VAR).