Footballers at this summer’s World Cup may be deemed offside by wayward haircuts or even bumpy tattoos as VAR technology gets a massive overhaul.
The controversial offside tech is getting a state-of-the-art makeover ahead of the tournament in the Americas to make it even more accurate.
Whereas now, VAR checks generic body shapes when officials want to see if a goal was offside, at the competition all players actual likenesses will be used – including tattoos and hairstyles marked accurately to millimetres. It could see stars like Harry Kane, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland and Raphinha ruled offside in a key matchday moment due to their unique body parts.
FIFA and its tech partner Lenovo have confirmed all 1,200 players across all 48 competing nations attending the tournament will be individually 3D scanned before a ball is kicked. The coloured scans replace the generic grey stick figures that have infuriated fans during VAR checks on TV with photorealistic ‘digital twins’ accurate to the minutae.
Each footie star will go through the same process: step into a ring of 36 cameras, hold still for a fraction of a second, and walk out. Around three hours later, a full reconstruction of their exact body exists in three dimensions, including vital stats such as their chest width, foot size, and actual height, as well as their visible tattoos and exact haircut.
And your Daily Star was among the first to try out the new process, with our reporter becoming the first tattooed person ever scanned by the new system during a rare behind-the-scenes visit to FIFA’s Zurich headquarters.
The AI-enabled 3D avatars sit on top of the existing semi-automated offside system and increase accuracy down to just five millimetres. A wrong haircut could make all the difference.
In tests, the margin for error is so slim anyone sporting a Carlos Valderrama-style barnet will be at a distinct disadvantage.
“It’s not a default puppet, it’s not a random shape, it’s the actual body of the player,” Dr Valerio Rizzo, the Lenovo neuroscientist-turned-AI architect who built the system, told us.
“The avatar precision is in a sub-centimetre error range. This is our conservative estimation.”
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