What Automating the Tightest Call Actually Bought
Semi-automated offside did not make offside simple, and it was never going to, because the complexity never lived in the eyesight. What automation did was isolate the one genuinely geometric part of that rule, the comparison of positions at a fixed timestamp, and remove human perceptual limits from it, while leaving every interpretive part exactly where it always was. The result is a call that is more consistent than it used to be and no less argued about, because the arguments that survive are about involvement, contact and how much tolerance a sport should extend to lines nobody can see.
