FIFA’s Plans To Improve VAR Offside Calls With Artificial Intelligence

The world’s football governing body, FIFA, plans to improve Video offside calls with artificial intelligence.

The 2019 Club World Cup might be remembered for Roberto Firmino’s late goal that helped Liverpool win the trophy for the first time in their history. But in one of the backrooms in Qatar, the first steps were being taken to use the latest technology to improve Video Assistant Referees.

FIFA used the Club World Cup to run their first offline tests, kept totally separate from the officials on the pitch, of a new technology that aims to improve VAR’s ability to make decisions over offside.

The technology being looked at is a semi-automated offside system that combines limb tracking with artificial intelligence.

Currently, optical tracking is commonplace in leagues around the world for performance analysis, and fans see it all the time through things like heatmaps. That optical tracking uses one point per player, but limb tracking follows between 15 and 20 points per player. Based on these data points, algorithms can work out which point, which limb, is closest to the goal line at any given moment, and can then use this to create the offside lines. This data, combined with artificial intelligence, is used to create a semi-automated offside system which detects the moment the ball is played and places the offside line in the correct position.

This differs from the current VAR offside technology where humans decide which frame to use and where the VAR line should be drawn. Using AI to do this task would obviously speed up the whole process.

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FIFA Director of Football Technology and Innovation, Johannes Holzmüller, told me that the offline trials in Qatar were “very promising” and that FIFA could see the potential for the technology to help reduce time and increase accuracy when referees make offside calls using VAR.