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The most anticipated sports tournament in the world FIFA World Cup starts on this Sunday (20.11.2022). This is the most important football (soccer) tournament played every 4 years to emerge a new World Cup champion. The opening ceremony and the football game between the host of the World Cup- Qatar and their opponent Ecuador on Sunday will begin a 4 weeks battle of the best teams in the world. This year’s tournament is not like any before, starting in November in the middle of the football season. Normally it was around June only because the temperature in Qatar is too high in the summer. It is still around 30°C every day during World Cup. It will be also a debut for FIFA’s brand new semi-automatic offside technology.
After the great success of VAR (Video Assistant Referee) being used on FIFA World Cup 2018 in Russia and then followed by major football leagues FIFA decided to still develop various technologies, which may be implemented into use. One of them is semi-automatic offside technology, a VAR tool responsible for making way faster and more accurate offside decisions. The system automatically determines the player position at the exact moment of the ball being played towards him, but how is that even possible? It is thanks to this year’s official World Cup adidas ball Al Rihla and 12 tracking cameras. The ball has a special sensor mounted inside, which sends data 500 times per second to establish the exact moment of pass. This is way more accurate than basing it on the optical tracking by the assistant referee. Cameras are mounted underneath the roof of the stadium and are responsible for tracking the ball and 29 data points on each player’s body 50 times per second, which determines the player’s position on the pitch and if he is on the offside or not. After the referee call 3D animation is being created and it is shown to the fans to dispel the doubts. According to FIFA expectations the whole process will take about 25 seconds per decision, so it lowers the current average wait time almost by 45 seconds per decision.
A lot of fans, even some of the footballers are complaining about technology killing the true beauty of the game, but the football world, like everyone else wants to keep up with the newest technology and apply it into use in order to reduce people’s mistakes and save some time as in the case of the semi-automatic offside technology.
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As a football fan, when Var was first introduced I was excited and supported the idea of it, as I was against false decisions from the referees, and a lot of teams have suffered from wrong decisions done, so I thought that Var would put an end to it and would make the game better than ever, however, after applying it to the game, I felt like something was missing, something was stolen from the game, I felt that the matches weren’t as before, I would agree that it killed the natural beauty of the game, and I wish that someday football would go back to the same way it was before.