Offside decisions are getting a shakeup in the 2024/25 Premier League season. After a campaign littered with bone-headed blunders, England’s top flight will use semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) for the first time.
The aim of introducing the technology is to reduce the length of VAR checks for offside calls and eliminate the examples of “significant human error” that have undermined games in the world’s top league. The technology is used in Italy’s Serie A, the Champions League and was put in place at Euro 2024, when a chip was placed inside the matchday ball.
England may be football’s self-declared inventors, but they have often been slow to accept modern advances in the game. The nation infamously declined invitations to the first editions of the World Cup and European Cup. Here’s everything you need to know about the Premier League’s belated step into the present day.
Changes For 2024/25 Season Onwards
On 11th April 2024, it was announced that all the Premier League clubs had agreed to implement SAOT for next season. Chief refereeing officer of Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL), Howard Webb, presented the technology to Premier League shareholders, using examples from the Champions League to explain the benefits of the new system. The Premier League announced the new offside rule with the following statement:
“At a Premier League Shareholders’ meeting today, clubs unanimously agreed to the introduction of Semi-Automated Offside Technology.
“The new system will be used for the first time in the Premier League next season, and it is anticipated the technology will be ready to be introduced after one of the autumn international breaks.
“The technology will provide quicker and consistent placement of the virtual offside line, based on optical player tracking, and will produce high-quality broadcast graphics to ensure an enhanced in-stadium and broadcast experience for supporters.”
The same cameras and technology that are used in the Champions League will be implemented in the Premier League next season. It is believed that SAOT will save just over 30 seconds on average per decision. The time taken to draw manual offside lines has been widely criticised since VAR was introduced in 2019, which is a key reason why all Premier League clubs have unanimously agreed to bring in the technology.
It is also understood that the new technology will hopefully end the recent trend in England’s top division when assistant referees keep their flags down before the play is eventually stopped when the attack is finished. In the new system, the assistant referee will be instructed by VAR officials at Stockley Park to raise their flag immediately in the event that an attacker is offside, according to the new technology. Ed Mackey explained how semi-automated offsides work in a piece for The Athletic.
“When a player receives the ball in an offside position, the technology provides an automatic alert to the officials in the video operation room. Before informing the on-field referee of the decision, the video match officials check that the kicking point and the automated offside line have been correctly recorded.
“It is hoped that the entire process takes a matter of seconds rather than a few minutes.”
The Premier League and Offside Technology – Timeline of Events | |
|---|---|
Date/Season | Event |
2019/20 | VAR introduced in the Premier League. |
2021/22 | In the first two seasons of VAR, the Premier League showed the whole offside process to broadcasters. From 2021/22, all that was shared with viewers was the final image confirming the decision of offside or not. |
June 2023 | The Premier League decided against implementing SAOT for the upcoming 2023/24 season. It is confirmed, though, that they are testing artificial-intelligence-based semi-automated offside technology due to its successful implementation in the 2022 World Cup. |
September 2023 | Luis Diaz scores a goal in an onside position, but VAR fail to overturn the on-field decision of offside. This is seen as the final straw for the current offside system, which involves VAR officials manually drawing lines. |
11th April 2024 | The Premier League announced that all 20 clubs have “unanimously agreed” to introduce SAOT in the 2024/25 campaign. |
Where Semi-Automated Offsides Have Been Used Before
The first time this technology was trialled was during the 2021 Arab Cup, which is a competition contested by Middle Eastern and North African countries. This was done to ensure that the system was effective so that it could be used for the 2022 World Cup. In Qatar, 12 tracking cameras operated under the roof of the stadium, as well as up to 29 data points on every player, tracking the body parts that can be used to play the ball. Pierluigi Collina, who was the Chair of the FIFA referees committee, discussed the introduction of the technology ahead of the 2022 World Cup, explaining:
“VAR has already had a very positive impact on football, and we can see that the number of major mistakes has already been dramatically reduced. We expect that semi-automated offside technology can take us a step further. We are aware that sometimes the process to check a possible offside takes too long, especially when the offside incident is very tight. This is where semi-automated offside technology comes in – to offer faster and more accurate decisions.”
Other competitions that have seen the new system put in place include the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the Champions League in the last two seasons. In the last 18 months, Serie A has also introduced the technology. La Liga will also implement SAOT from the start of next season, as they announced this decision in October 2023. Given the successful use of SAOT in club and country competitions, the Premier League has decided to become the latest league to introduce the technology in late 2024.
Implementation of SAOT in European Leagues | |
|---|---|
Competition | SAOT Introduction |
Serie A | January 2023 |
La Liga | Start of 2024/25 Season |
Premier League | September-November 2024 |
How Offsides Used to Work in the Premier League
The Premier League previously operated with an on-field referee and assistants, along with VAR officials located at Stockley Park. There were two separate lines for the defender and attacker, which were drawn against body parts that could be used to score goals. A manual crosshair line was originally positioned with the attacking line coloured yellow and the black defensive line.
If it was a tight offside call, a thicker broadcast line was applied to determine the final decision. The VAR operators then coloured the attacking line red if they were in an offside position or produced a green line if they were onside. This system was routinely criticised by fans and pundits for the time taken to draw the lines and the fact that fans within the stadium were not able to see replays of the incident.
Fans also questioned whether VAR lines were drawn at the correct angle, namely parallel with the goal line, as viewers were not able to see the process of drawing the lines during broadcast coverage. Before the 2023/24 campaign, the Premier League released an article explaining:
“A lot of it is down to the camera angle and perspective. Unless a broadcast camera is perfectly in line with the last defender, the camera angle can make him appear to be further back or forward than he is in reality of the horizontal line drawn. This is also true of the vertical line drawn with respect to gravity adjudging offsides. This will only appear straight if the camera is in line with the offside incident. They also don’t always appear perfectly vertical because TV cameras are very rarely perfectly horizontal. If roll is applied to the camera, ie it is not perfectly horizontal, the vertical line can appear to lean to one side.”
Controversial Offside Decisions From Recent Seasons
The offside system outlined above came into serious question during the 2023/24 campaign. Most notably, Luis Diaz’s ghost goal against Tottenham on 30th September 2023 was seen as a tipping point that forced Premier League clubs to consider a new way of doing things. Liverpool’s Diaz was originally ruled to be offside in the first half of the match, and the VAR mistakenly agreed with the decision to disallow the goal after a breakdown in communication. The damning replays showed that Diaz was onside by a significant margin, which was met with widespread condemnation from Liverpool and pundits in the commentary box.
This incident was described as a “significant human error”. The PGMOL were concerned at the start of the 2023/24 season that VAR officials were taking too much time to draw lines for offside decisions, leading to a quick call in the case of Diaz, which was fundamentally wrong. As a result of the Diaz debacle, many Premier League executives deemed the mistake to be the final straw to ensure the implementation of SAOT in the Premier League. The system was rejected at the start of the 2023/24 season with reservations over its effectiveness, but this incident was one mistake too many.
The 2022/23 campaign saw another high-profile mistake by VAR officials when drawing the lines for offside. During Brighton’s 1-1 draw against Crystal Palace in February 2023, John Brooks, who was on VAR, ruled out a Pervis Estupinan goal after drawing the offside lines based on the wrong Palace player. As a result of Brooks’ mistake, he was taken off VAR duties for the next two Premier League fixtures.
When Semi-Automated Offside Technology Will be Introduced During the 2024/25 Season
The Premier League may have given the green light for SAOT, but there will still be a delay before the technology is introduced across the competition’s 20 teams. The implementation date has not yet been confirmed and is expected to be around October, but could be as late as the other side of the November international break, more than three months into the new campaign.
This delay, which throws up uncomfortable questions regarding the fairness of a competition when some matches are played with technology that is not available to others, stems from a change in provider. The Premier League’s existing contract with VAR partner Hawk-Eye came to an end at the conclusion of the 2023/24 campaign and any new provider will require months of extensive testing protocols before taking the technology live.