Argentina’s 3 goals shake ‘nullified’ Saudi nets
Read it as ‘SAOT’, hi-tech integration… Much more accurate than VAR
On the night of the 22nd, there was an unexpected loss in the Qatar World Cup champions, the strong Argentina, who were defeated by Saudi Arabia. This is because 3 out of 4 goals scored by Argentina were invalidated due to the appearance of ‘the harshest referee in the 90 year history of the World Cup’.
“There is no coming”… A precise referee with a sensory ball
Lionel Messi, who will become the ‘last dance’ of this World Cup, easily scored the opening goal in the 10th minute of the first half. In the 22nd minute of the first half, Messi’s shot rattled the Saudi net. Argentina scored additional goals one after the other in the 27th and 35th minutes of the first half. The problem is that all three goals have been invalidated.
The latest technology used from the Qatar 2022 World Cup, the ‘Semi-Automatic All Side System (SAOT)’. This system was introduced for the first time by the International Football Federation (FIFA) and is a state-of-the-art technology developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) over three years .
SAOT reads the joint movements of players at a frequency of 50 times per second through 12 tracking cameras under the roof of the stadium. Here, an inertial measurement sensor (IMU) is placed inside the official ‘Alilla’ World Cup soccer ball to detect the movement of the ball at a frequency of 500 times per second. The latest technology captures even the smallest movements of players and balls to make decisions. It is incomparably more accurate than video reading (VAR), which relied on ‘humans’. With the development of technology, the toughest and scariest referee in the history of the World Cup of more than 90 years has appeared.
In the past, disputes over offside decisions have often occurred at World Cups, but the introduction of SAOT has greatly improved the accuracy of adjudication. VAR, which was introduced earlier, had the fatal disadvantage of taking a long time for judgment and interfering with the flow of the game, but SAOT has the advantage of reducing judgment time by up to 25 seconds.
SAOT, equipped with the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology, will act as referee for a month until the World Cup final on the 19th of next month. The same applies to the Taegeuk Warriors before the match against Uruguay at 10:00pm on the same day.
In addition to VAR, which was first introduced in the previous tournament, the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the SAOT applied this time allowed participating players to be judged at the highest level ever. “Given the difficulty VAR referees have in judging the situation in tense offside situations, SAOT technology makes it faster and more accurate,” said FIFA Referee President Pieruiza Collina, who earned the nickname ‘alien referee’ for his strict and correct judgments. We can make the final decision,” he said.
Even in the 40 degree heat, the stadium is ‘cold’
Hidden science and technology can be seen in and around the Qatar World Cup Stadium. Qatar is hot enough to reach 40 degrees Celsius in the middle of the day even in November. In fact, it is difficult to play a normal football game, but the inside of the stadium is cool, so you can show your performance without difficulty. This is because a cool breeze comes out of the vents around the entire stadium. It uses electricity to cool the water and cools the air with water before sending it to the stadium. In other words, the whole stadium is a ‘very large air conditioner’.
Dr said. Saud Abdul Ghani from Qatar University, who is responsible for the cooling system for the Qatar World Cup stadium, in an interview with FIFA, “A spectator watching a match in a football field sweats about 70g per hour, and a soccer player runs more than 10km during a match and sweats about 3L. “In Qatar, which has a hot desert climate, it is inevitable to be more sensitive to temperature control for the health of the players and the satisfaction of the spectators, so we designed an air conditioning system that cools the entire stadium.”
Cool air also comes out from under the spectator seats, making the temperature similar to watching the game. Infrared cameras measure the body temperature of spectators and players in real time and adjust the cooling level at that time.
AI technology that prevents accidents by observing crowds in real time is also used. Security is checked through 22,000 security cameras installed throughout the World Cup Stadium. The flow of crowds can be controlled through AI technology, preventing congestion in some areas.
Reporter Jo Ara Hankyung.com rrang123@hankyung.com
