Chelsea’s Club World Cup final against Palmeiras will feature new technology that aims to make semi-automated offside decisions within three seconds.
The technology has been approved by Fifa and is being trialled at the inter-continental tournament in an attempt to eliminate the long delays over close offside decisions.
If successful, it could be brought in ahead of the World Cup finals in Qatar at the end of the year.
Football fans have grown frustrated by VAR delays as officials determine the points of the attacker and defender using lines draw across the screen.
But Fifa hope the technology, which uses Artificial Intelligence and specifically-positioned cameras, will streamline that process and be able to automatically determine whether a player is offside in moments.
It has been compared to goalline technology, which uses Hawkeye technology to instantly rule whether the ball has crossed the line, but with greater challenges as the points of offsides are always changing during a match.
Pierluigi Collina, the chairman of Fifa’s referees’ committee, insisted that match officials will still have the final call and said the technology should not be compared to “robot referees”.
“I know that for headlines ‘robot offside’ or something similar is very easy, but this is not the case,” he said. “You have seen that the technology is simply a tool used by a human being.
“There is not any outcome bypassing the match officials on the field of play, off the field of play. They are involved in the decision-making process and they are responsible for the final decision taken.
“It is still a tool. It is a tool available to increase accuracy and improve the time, something quicker.
“The last part, the animation, refers more to reliability. People understand from the image what happens and trust much more in what happened, the decision. If you do not understand because you do not see clearly what happened, then you start doubting the decision itself.”
