The news broke on Monday. The semi-automatic offside call (SAOT, for its acronym in English) could reach LaLiga Santander next season. And it is that, even if it is clear and without doubts at the beginning, the nullified purpose Marco Asensio during the Clásico played on Sunday in between FC Barcelona and real Madrid at Camp Nou, which ended 2-1 in favor of the blaugrana, he once again put on the table the need to implement this technology in the Spanish championship.
“He offered himself to LaLiga”
“In the RFEF, both in the Spanish Super Cup and in the Copa del Rey final, they are already using this system. It was offered to LaLiga from the very beginning and the clubs and LaLiga have to ask us for it. According to what they asked us to do, it will be implemented”, the RFEF president said this Tuesday. Luis Rubiales. An implementation that, as this newspaper has already explained, LaLiga is testing and studying.
But what is semi-automatic offside and how does it work? FIFA itself refers to it as “a support tool for video referees that will help them make faster and more accurate offside decisions by automatically determining the relative position of the players involved at the exact moment of play.” “.
Its operation
The semi-automated technology works through 12 monitoring cameras installed on the roof of the stadiums, which capture the movements of the ball and up to 29 data points of each player -50 times per second-, calculating their exact position on the field, which allows the VOR room arbitration team to know the exact position of a player at any given time. The 29 points mentioned above include body parts that are considered to signal an offside.
All this player and ball data is processed in real time by Artificial Intelligence (AI), which, when it detects an illegal position, issues an automatic warning – whenever a player receives the ball in advance – in the video room.
This is when the arbitration team of the VOR room has confirmed, or not, the proposal of the system, manually checking the exact moment of the hit and the automatically created offside line. If so, the decision is communicated to the main referee via earpiece and, once the main referee confirms offside, a replay animation is created – created using the same tracking data and information used by the referees in the courtroom. video – which is broadcast in the stadium and on TV.
In European competition it premiered in October
After FIFA used it in 2022 in tournaments such as the Africa Cup in Cameroon and the Club World Cup played in the United Arab Emirates, the official premiere of the semi-automatic offside game in European competition took place on October 10 last year at the Olympics. stadium in Helsinki, where the European Super Cup was held, which took the real Madrid by defeating the eintracht frankfurt for 2-0.
It was later used in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and is currently also used in the Champions League, beyond the tournaments already mentioned such as the Club World Cup, the European Super Cup, the Spanish Super Cup… Or, as revealed by MD , in the final of the Copa del Rey that will take place on May 6 in La Cartuja.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
