3D players, here is the semi-automatic offside: “There will no longer be a Candreva case” – Calcio

LISSONE – Saot, the semi-automatic offside, will also make its debut in Italy next Wednesday, the next step towards the digitization of refereeing. In truth, it will debut in Saudi Arabia, because the debut of the new technology will take place in Riyadh on the occasion of the Italian Super Cup between Milan and Inter which will be played on Wednesday 19. In the league, the Saot will be officially and definitively introduced at the end of the month, with the of the return round.

Serie A was the first to introduce the Saot

“We were the first league in the world to have adopted Gol line technology and, since 2017, the Var” boasted Luigi De Siervo, CEO of the League, “and now we are the first to introduce the Saot”, already used in the Champions League League and in the World Cup in Qatar but not yet in the national leagues. The Italian referees have tested it offline in recent months on championship matches and have also worked on it during the world break because, as the referee designer Gianluca Rocchi explained, “we take a leap forward from a technological point of view but the human remains fundamental”.

The last word always remains with the referee

In particular, it will be up to var and avar to establish whether an offside player will be active or passive, “because the machine tells us the objectivity of a position, but in the end it is the referees and assistants in the flesh who evaluate each position in its subjectivity”.

Eight cameras to “create” 3D footballers

The Saot is a technology developed by Hawk Eye, the same company that deals with Gol line technology and assists Var and Avar in the very modern center of Lissone where every match is sieved by the slow motion. Specifically, there will be eight cameras that will track up to 29 points on each player’s body, processing images first in 2D and then in 3D in a very short time, which in a few seconds will signal to the referees the presence or absence of an irregular position. “A Candreva case is unrepeatable” explained De Siervo, recalling what happened in Juventus-Salernitana, when all the electronic eyes lost the position of the player who kept all the others in play. The advantage of the semi-automatic offside is first of all the accuracy (there will no longer be lines to draw and millimeter checks to do) but also the immediacy, because the revisions will require less time than at present. “But haste must never go to the detriment of accuracy”, Rocchi points out. “I always recommend four things to my parents: accuracy, accuracy, accuracy and optimization of game time recovery.”

Rocchi: “We are working to reduce breaks”

Playing more and having less downtime is Rocchi’s goal. “In the meantime, I would like to dispel the rumor that less play is played in Italy”, explains the designator: the average effective time is 54′, only inferior to the 56′ of the Champions League. “On average, recovery is a total of seven and a half minutes, the longest among the top leagues. But we are working to reduce breaks more and more: net of forced breaks, such as those for substitutions or monitor reviews, we can intervene above all on the resumption of the game in advance. A minute and 40 seconds can pass between the awarding of a free kick and his serving: it’s too much. I asked my referees to intervene above all on this aspect”. In practice, it is a question of reducing player protests and avoiding gatherings. “This year bookings and sendings of coaches are down. It means that the relationship with them is improving.”

Sacchi goes “on the bench”, congratulations to Massa

In this regard, Rocchi praised the behavior of Inzaghi and Spalletti, who blessed the designation of the Milanese Sozza for Inter-Napoli, which broke down the constraint of geographical incompatibility. Again within the Nerazzurri, the designator described Sacchi’s mistake in the Monza-Inter match, which denied the Nerazzurri a third goal, as an “accident”. “Sacchi won’t be suspended, at most he’ll go on the bench for a while. I have an excellent team and problems with abundance: it’s normal that I let those who play for 9 and not those who play for 6”. Praise instead for Massa, the Milan-Roma referee: “Usually we play a lot with him and there are few cards, while Sunday went exactly the opposite. But he did very well: instead of imposing his style on the match, he indulged in the one chosen by the players. There have been a number of fouls, and subsequent action, in line with a play-off safety.”

In the future, fewer referees and more Var

For the future, the trend will be specialization and separation of careers. “We will have fewer and fewer field referees and more and more monitor referees”, prefigures Rocchi. “Being a referee or a var, a linesman or avar are completely different jobs, it will be inevitable to move towards the separation of roles, even more so with the introduction of the Saot”.

Offside will never be automatic

It should be pointed out that the offside detection will hardly become completely automatic, because human intervention will always be needed to decide whether or not a player in an irregular position influences the game. And for the moment, Saot will only be able to intervene on actions concluded with a goal (or with a penalty): in order to be able to suggest if there is an offside in any situation, a modification of the Var protocol and therefore of the regulation itself would be necessary, which is not up to certainly to the referees or to the Football Federation, but to the Ifab, the international body managed by Fifa.