Fifa confirms plans to use ‘robo linesmen’ at World Cup 2022 to make instant offside calls
FIFA has confirmed it wants ‘robo linesmen’ to call offsides at next year’s World Cup finals. And world chiefs are keen to roll out Arsene Wenger’s new ‘daylight’ offside idea in a bid to guarantee more goals. Fifa president Gianni Infantino revealed he is ploughing full steam ahead with ‘semi automatic offsides’. That sees the […]
FIFA has confirmed it wants ‘robo linesmen’ to call offsides at next year’s World Cup finals.
And world chiefs are keen to roll out Arsene Wenger’s new ‘daylight’ offside idea in a bid to guarantee more goals.
Fifa president Gianni Infantino revealed he is ploughing full steam ahead with ‘semi automatic offsides’.
That sees the use of artificial intelligence ‘skeletal technology’ to give assistant referees instant signals of an attacker transgressing.
Infantino said: “We tested it at two games in the Club World Cup in January and the tests were very positive.
“VAR can take too long on occasions, although it brings justice, but with this technology we will get instant decisions.”
Fifa refs’ chief, former Italian whistler Pierluigi Collina, confirmed the instantaneous decisions will still require VAR to check if a player adjudged offside off the ball interfered with play.
Collina, though, added: “We are running trials as fast as possible with the objective to implement this in the 2022 World Cup.
“It is clear that it reduces the time needed to decide on an offside situation, even though it detects even more marginal offsides than VAR can at present.”
But a bigger change will be the adoption of the Wenger proposal, revealed by SunSport last year.
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Under the change envisaged by the former Arsenal boss, a player will be deemed onside if any goalscoring part of his body overlaps the last defender.
Infantino said: “Our aim is always to see if we can make football more attractive without changing the nature of the game.
“Arsene made a presentation to us and told us that, based on the statistics in the Premier League, this would halve the number of offsides in a game, because the marginal decisions would not be offside any more.
“This will have for us to look at the impact but we want to make football even more attacking and passionate.”