Chelsea will be the first Premier League club to try out FIFA’s new ‘robot referee’ technology at the Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi.
The new limb-tracking technology aims to make automatic offside decisions within half a second, ending the long delays associated with Video Assistant Referees (VAR).
FIFA hope to fully implement the technology in time for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar in November, after a ‘successful’ trial at the recent Arab Cup.
The Club World Cup, which begins on Thursday, will also be used as a test event, with Chelsea becoming the first British club to sample the technology.
The semi-automatic decision-making system uses up to 12 cameras in the roof of the stadium to capture the movement of all the players and the ball.
The technology creates an animated skeleton of the players through 29 data points, which can be accessed 50 times per second to make a correct offside call.
If a player is in an offside position, the tracking system alerts the VAR operator within half a second.
