A 2022 World Cup game scene
Qatar 2022 World Cup was thrilling. It served us with unexpected dishes and we kept yearning for more – from Morocco becoming the first Arab/ African country to play in the semi-finals in World Cup history, through Japan knocking out a six-time World Cup Champion – Spain, to Saudi Arabia wounding the now reigning champion – Argentina – in their opening game.
And then how the curtains of the tournament came down by a thrilling and fierce battle between the two champions. Like any sport, football is not without emotional outbursts that flow from unfair play to bad refereeing decisions. We all remember Chelsea’s Michael Ballack chasing a referee down the length of the pitch when he allegedly failed to spot an apparently blatant handball in the (in)famous 9th May, 2009, semi-final game against Barcelona that went on to knock Chelsea out of the Champions League on away goals.
Such human errors have been part of the game and are the reason referee-assisting technologies were introduced. At the greatest platform of glamorous music performances from the world’s best, showered with beautiful visual effects display, graced with a breathtaking display of talent and skill by the creme de la creme of our time, stands were sent into ecstatic and memorable joy.
Yet, technology is not thanked enough for its fairness and transparency and keeping unbroken hearts throughout the tournament. Fifa continues to believe, invest, improve and deploy video assistant referee tools to fill in for human errors and controversies. Qatar2022 was another display of how far technology can save jaws from blows when things heat up over referees’ errors.
Look at the goal-line technology. It was introduced in 2014 and continues to play a key role in the game of sports. The technology, which is accessible through a wearable watch, notifies the referee whether the ball has fully crossed the line before he or she takes the final decision to ensure immediate response.
The system uses 14 high-speed cameras mounted on the catwalk of stadiums under the roof. The data from the cameras is then used to create a 3D animation to visualise the decision to the fans on TVs and on the giant screen inside the stadium.
The semi-automated offside technology is a support tool that helped video match and the on-field officials to make faster, more reproducible and more accurate offside decisions. Throughout the tournament, we saw animated visual displays of players on our screen after offside decisions, and this reduced the number of controversial goals.
The technology uses 12 dedicated tracking cameras mounted underneath the roof of stadiums to track the ball and up to 29 data points of each individual player, 50 times per second, calculating their precise position on the pitch. The 29 collected data points include all limbs and extremities relevant for making offside calls.
The Al Rihla, Adidas’ official match ball for Qatar 2022, provided a vital element for the detection of tight offside incidents because an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor was placed inside the ball. This sensor was always positioned in the centre of the ball, to send ball data to the video operation room 500 times per second, allowing a very precise detection of the kick point.
By combining the limb and ball-tracking data and applying artificial intelligence, the new technology provided an automated offside alert to the video match officials inside the video operation room whenever the ball was received by an attacker who was in an offside position at the moment the ball was played by a teammate. In a few seconds, the video match official would check, make a decision and alert the pitch officials.
When and where on the pitch referees confirmed the decision, the precise positional data points used to make the decision are then generated into a 3D animation, perfectly detailing the position of the players’ limbs at the moment the ball was played.
This 3D animation then shows the best possible perspectives for an offside situation on giant screens in the stadium. How else would you have loved a World Cup!
morgan@ensetlaw.com
The author is the legal tech and legal compliance consultant at Enset Tech Ltd
Source: The Observer
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