The use and application of the offside law somehow appears to have become more controversial ever since VAR arrived on the scene. Ever since, lines have been drawn on pitches inaccurately and frames rolled forward one-by-one live on television.
Gone are those days, if FIFA’s new technology is to serve its purpose. The governing body have announced that a new ‘semi-automatic’ offside system will be implemented at the Qatar World Cup in November.
The new system, which should be able to construct a 3D representation of the play within seconds and send an alert to the referee to determine whether a player was offside or not.
As noted by Diario AS, it is not yet clear whether the technology will be used throughout the 90 minutes or if it will only be applied during VAR reviews.
As with VAR, this appears a good idea. The way it is used may determine whether it is successful, but this should in theory make offsides much simpler and hopefully resemble goal-line technology rather than the haphazard VAR. One question that might be raised is why the World Cup is the first competition to be using it, given how high the stakes are.
