At next week’s Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi, Chelsea FC will be the first Premier League team to undergo the newest experiment of “robot referees,” with the new technology making automated offside judgments in the second half.
The football-obsessed robot has a limb-tracking system that uses special cameras mounted on stadium rooftops. It uses 29 data points to generate an animated skeleton of players, and it should be able to speed up decision-making surrounding questionable offside rulings.
If the technology determines that a player is onside or not, video assistant referees will get an almost instantaneous alarm, which will be conveyed to the referee. The new approach has the “potential to deliver fresh information for coaches, medical staff, and fans,” according to FIFA.
The technology will also enable backroom staff to “analyse the action from the point of view of a specific player on the pitch, scrutinise a match-changing moment from the perfect angle or get a bird’s-eye view of the pitch.”
The governing body hopes that the new technology will be fully available in time for November’s World Cup after a successful trial in the recent Arab Cup held in Qatar.