FIFA Club World Cup trials cutting-edge ref tech in 2025

With the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 ending, the popular football tournament has showcased how innovative technologies can help shape its practices and improve the referees’ decision-making process toward more precise and fairer matches.

Indeed, as Chelsea defeated PSG to a 3-0 victory and won the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, there were complex advances at play behind the scenes, for the first time featuring body cameras for referees and advanced semi-automated offside technology, according to a report from July 11.

Cutting-edge ref tech debuting at 2025 FIFA Club World Cup

As it turns out, the body cameras exceeded expectations by offering unique insights for both TV audiences and referee training, the outcome of which the FIFA Referees Committee Chairman, the famous Pierluigi Collina, praised as going “beyond our expectations.”

“We thought it would have been an interesting experience for TV viewers and we’ve received great comments. (…) We were asked: ‘Why not in all the matches?’ and even more: ‘Why not in all sports?’”

On top of its entertainment value, he said the technology was “very, very positive” for FIFA’s own purposes, especially coaching the referees and providing feedback, as it provided the opportunity to “see what the referee sees on the field of play.”

At the same time, further improvements to the semi-automated offside technology have contributed to faster decisions for offside situations and Collina said it helped avoid situations where forwards run 30 to 40 meters only for the flag to be raised at the end:

“The alert went to the assistant referees well before, when there was a clear offside position. So, it worked very well, we had the goals disallowed, correctly disallowed; we also had correct decisions supported by the semi-automatic offside technology – [we are] very happy, very pleased.”

Specifically, it only requires manual oversight if a player is within 10 centimeters from the offside line. The technology is the result of the Football Technology Center AG, a joint venture that FIFA and Sony-owned Hawk-Eye Innovations created last November to assist referees and automate data collection with computer vision algorithms.

At the same time, this year’s World Cup saw the premiere of Hisense’s cutting-edge display technology featured in the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) room at the International Broadcast Center (IBC), where it provided a sharper and more immersive view of every game played.

Elsewhere, researchers have designed an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision system that allows computers to interpret and analyze visual data frame-by-frame, and this way provides more precise detection of fouls in basketball.