Putting an end to the controversy… on offside refereeing. The World Cup in Qatar, which kicks off this Sunday, will feature cutting-edge technologies for modern football. Tested in 2018 during the World Cup in Russia and adopted since in all professional championships, video assistance to arbitration (VAR) is logically back in service. After a somewhat mixed review. Because she did not know how to completely solve the thorny problem of offside. It will be assisted, this time, by an innovation closer to the players: a connected ball, covered with sensors and doped with artificial intelligence.
Baptized Al Rilha (the journey, in Arabic), it is the result of several years of R&D by the German start-up Kinexon and Adidas, the official supplier of the World Cups for half a century. It embeds a miniaturized inertial unit, i.e. a galaxy of ultra-precise motion sensors. “They are positioned in the heart of the ball and send data 500 times per second to the 26 antennas positioned around the field,” explains Oliver Hundacker, director of product development at Adidas.
“It allows you to know where the ball is with an accuracy of two milliseconds to help make the right decision for an offside,” he says. Because this very precise data takes the direction of the viewing room of the video referees. They will be combined with the positions of the players captured by 12 cameras and analyzed by powerful algorithms. Result: no longer much doubt about the position of the player with the ball in relation to the offside line.
An alert will automatically be sent to the men in black installed in the cabin. “It will no longer be possible to contest while the VAR remains in the contestable state depending on where the video referee stops the image, the quality of the images and the few centimeters on which an action is played”, approves Saïd Ennjimi, former international referee and consultant for Équipe TV. “This removes human error, which is part of the principle of sport, but you have to live with the times, especially since the stakes are enormous in a match”, he notes.
The experimentation will be completely imperceptible for the players because the ball will have the same appearance and the same weight. “This technology has been rigorously tested in competition by professional teams and amateur clubs around the world, sometimes without them being aware during blind tests”, details Oliver Hundacker of Adidas. The first matches of the competition will determine the potential – like the future – of this connected ball, which will not be able to roll on all grounds in the world anyway, because each championship has its own supplier.