FIFA will use 10 to 12 cameras, collecting up to 29 data points per player 50 times per second, to make semi-autonomous offside decisions at the Arab Cup
The use of technology to help officials make more accurate offside decisions will be tested at the Fifa Arab Cup, which starts on Tuesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Arab Cup is the proving ground for a system FIFA had already committed to at scale: the semi-automated offside technology slated for the 2022 World Cup, which pairs 12 tracking cameras with a sensor-equipped ball to cut average offside decision times from roughly 70 seconds to about 25. Testing it in a live tournament first lets FIFA validate camera calibration and limb-tracking accuracy before the world's biggest stage.
The move sits inside a broader shift in elite soccer toward sensor-driven officiating — Qatar's stadiums also carried player-tracking and crowd-forecasting algorithms per the World Cup tech rollout, and the English Premier League later planned its own camera-based offside system using dozens of iPhone-class cameras to replace its VAR setup.
First-order effects
- Match officials at the Arab Cup get machine-generated offside flags from 10-12 cameras sampling 29 body points per player 50 times per second, shifting their role from judging tight calls to confirming or overriding automated ones.
- Players and coaches in the tournament face a new decision regime where marginal offsides are flagged faster and with body-position data that was previously invisible to the naked eye.
Second-order effects
- A successful Arab Cup trial de-risks the World Cup deployment, giving FIFA evidence to defend the ~25-second decision-time claim against skepticism over semi-automated calls.
- Other leagues feel pressure to match the capability: the Premier League's plan to run 28+ iPhone-based cameras for offsides shows domestic competitions building parallel systems rather than waiting on FIFA's infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If computer-vision officiating proves reliable across FIFA, league, and motorsport contexts — FIA's own pixel-counting approach to track limits points the same direction — governing bodies converge on a model where sensors generate calls and humans handle only contested edge cases, restructuring how referee training, staffing, and accountability work.
The trend: Elite sport officiating is migrating from human judgment to camera-and-sensor systems that pre-compute decisions, with federations using smaller tournaments as live validation labs before full-scale rollouts.