Robot referees: How I predicted the football future
The subject matter of a pretty lame April Fool’s article from nine years ago is coming true.
Happy April Fools’ Day.
Given the chaos of the news in recent times the 2022 edition of the pranksters Christmas is perhaps the easiest yet. If a subset of humans can genuinely believe the Hollywood and Washington elites are harvesting the blood of children, why not bring back Swiss spaghetti trees, perhaps the most famous example of an April 1st jape.
Like with that infamous three-minute Panorama segment from 1957 the media still sometimes likes to play along with this hoaxster’s holiday. Whether that is wise in the current climate of distrust toward the mass media is a discussion for another day.
But what if your lark became true? That’s the situation I find myself in.
Nine years ago, not long into my first writing gig with a football content website, I put my name forward to try and give our readers a ribbing.
My editor played along, as long as it was made clear this was a gambit to avoid our readers being successfully hoodwinked (that and to appease the news aggregation sites which we relied upon).
So I came up with a stupid idea. As a kid, I loved the BBC TV show Robot Wars. Presented by Craig Charles and Philippa Forrester with commentary from Jonathan Pearce.
For the uninitiated, the show involved a bunch of nerds (a word I use with affection) injecting their finances, time and energy into building a weaponised remote control too, more often than not, send into a pit and get destroyed in seconds.
There were these ‘House Robots’ with names like ‘Shunt’ and ‘Sir Killalot’ who were genuine death machines who would tear the garage-built, spare-parters from mechanical limb-to-limb.
There were flamethrowers, hydraulic flipping ramps and opening chasms of abyss for somebody’s life work to plunge into.
It was fucking great.
Then there was RefBot. RefBot was lame. Dressed like an android Foot Locker employee he rolled around the arena spoiling the blood-thirsty fun when one of the House Robots overstepped their remit.
As a child who simply wanted to see maximum carnage, I hated RefBot. But on April Fools’ Day 2013 the little prick inspired me.
What if we had robot officials in professional football? So that’s the caper I went with.
The article kind of sucked. I was not very good at my job back then. Green, sure, but a bit slack.
It still exists on the internet here and I cringed reading it over. I included a few tell-tale signs it was an April Fools’ Day joke and after noon, the traditional end date for April Fools pranks in the United Kingdom, we posted a retraction with some of the best attempts from elsewhere that year. For example, Rickie Lambert’s international call-up by New Zealand - which definitely duped a few.
My robot referees were going to be linesmen, racing up and down the side of the pitch at 25 miles an hour using infrared tech to perpetually scan the boots and almost automatically tell if a player was offside, eradicating one of the sport’s most persistent human errors.
In line with RefBot, who could brandish yellow and red cards to errant BBC syndicated tech-butchers, I even pitched pop-up flags, to maintain the mystique of the assistant referee.
Utter gibberish.
However, in the near-decade that has followed, tech has seeped into the decision-making process of the beautiful game. The goal-line technology developed by Hawk-Eye has been a revelation (bar one glaring error) since its inception later in 2013.
It was, of course, a year too late for desolate England fans.
Then came VAR. With all its foibles, of which there are many, none can really be placed on the technology, more those in control of it.
Now comes the next stage of technological refereeing - robot linesman.
Nine years after my lame tongue-in-cheek effort, they are here. Apparently, ‘skeletal modelling’ will be used to help give ‘semi-automated’ offside decisions with remarkable accuracy.
It was already rolled out at the FIFA Club World Cup and could be in use at the World Cup in November.
Sure, it isn’t what I pitched. RefBot can likely remain in BBC storage for the time being. However, for a good yank to fully pull a leg it probably needs to be near enough to being believable.
In my case, nine years ago, I was just a little early.