2 years ago
FIFA added sensors on soccer balls for the 2022 World Cup because officials can't be trusted.
The last thing anyone needs is for the games to be stopped in order to examine penalties during the 64 games that will make up the upcoming 2022 FIFA World Cup in November. Hopefully, FIFA's newest innovative piece of technology will assist with that.
The world's governing body for soccer declared that it would begin utilizing "semi-automated offside technology" to determine whether a player is on or offside without conducting a thorough investigation. That is the regulation that states a player assaulting an opponent's goal cannot be closer to the goal than the ball and the second-closest opponent, for people (like me) who aren't soccer gurus.
In other words, you are offside if the goalie is the sole object between you and the goal while you don't have the ball. Since all it takes for something to be considered offside is for someone's knee to be half an inch closer to the goal than his opponent's, it's the kind of item that frequently halts play and can be challenging to spot. In order to measure both the positions of players and the position of the ball, FIFA is placing 12 specialized tracking cameras around the stadiums (as well as a sensor inside the ball itself).The men in the video operations room receive an alert if this new technology determines that an offside penalty happened, check the information, and then notify an on-field referee. Following unanimous agreement from all stakeholders, a 3D animation illustrating the offside penalty is immediately produced and broadcast to spectators in the stands and those watching on television at home.
Personally, I'm eager to see one of those 3D animations go horribly wrong and, for example, display a man's knee where his head should be.
The potential advantages of this new approach are very evident, even to someone who is not a soccer enthusiast. On Twitter, I follow a few Americans who get up early on weekends to watch English soccer, and they're always upset about the video assistant referee (or VAR) system that's now in place for reviewing calls. In addition to slowing down the games, relying on human referees to evaluate frame-by-frame video can lead to calls that may seem a little arbitrary to some.In reality, a 2021 survey indicated that only 26% of English Premier League players, who play at the highest level of the sport, approve the implementation of VAR. It will be a great challenge to get the remaining 74% of English soccer supporters to agree on anything. Many of the complaints about VAR are anticipated to disappear with the use of AI and unambiguous visual data to establish offside calls.
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