The 2026 World Cup will be the first edition of the tournament to use semi-automated offside technology, a change that will put a dozen cameras and 50 stills per second behind some of the game’s tightest calls. For assistant referees like Micheal Barwegan, the soccer offside rule is about to be judged with a speed and precision that have never been used on the sport’s biggest stage.
That is why the technology is getting attention now, before the first ball is kicked in 2026. Barwegan, part of the first all-Canadian officiating team in men’s World Cup history, says the system is built to help officials reach decisions faster, not replace them. If the computer is certain, it sends an offside message through the assistant referee’s earpiece. If the call is closer, it tells them to delay. If there is no clear offside to flag, there is no message at all.
Barwegan has already seen it work in live matches. He first used semi-automated offside technology last summer during Botafogo’s win over Paris Saint-Germain at the Club World Cup, after working with referee Drew Fischer and fellow assistant referee Lyes Arfa across the 2024 Olympics and that same tournament. The system tracks player movement using cameras that capture still images 50 times a second, then compares the position of the attacker and defender when the ball is played.
As of last summer’s Club World Cup, a player is clearly offside only when the gap between defender and attacker is more than 10cm. Barwegan says the machine does not make a decision until the offside-position player touches the ball, and that gives assistants a brief window to make the call themselves if the play is obvious. “When the ball gets played and a player’s running, I am quick to say [whether] he’s going to be offside or he’s good, and I will clear it to the referee in his earpiece before another decision has to be made,” he said. “The computer has to think, and it’s super fast, but [on the field] it feels like forever.”
He is not pretending the technology is flawless. “I’m gonna tell you, the semi-automated system is not perfect,” Barwegan said, even as he praised its accuracy as amazing and said it is as good as, if not better than, an assistant referee on routine offside calls. That gap matters because the World Cup debut will test not just the software, but how often officials trust it over their own read of a play.
Barwegan’s comfort with the new system comes from a career that started at age 12, when he began officiating to earn some pocket change. Within five years, he realized he liked calling games more than playing them. Now he is heading into the 2026 World Cup with a tool that may shorten some of the sport’s most disputed pauses, but one question remains open: on the tightest calls, how often will the technology change the answer before the assistant referee does?
