FIFA will try out a new ‘robot referee’ technology to make automatic offside decisions at the Club World Cup. As a consequence, Chelsea will be the first Premier League club to trial it.
The system will use up to 12 cameras in the roof of the stadium to capture the movement of the ball and the players.
It will also create an animated skeleton of the players through 29 data points. This can be assessed 50 times per second to establish the players’ position.
Once the technology finds a player to be offside, it alerts the VAR operator within half a second.
In case the trial is successful, FIFA intends to implement the system fully at the World Cup in Qatar at the end of this year.
