🇭🇷 Croatia got eliminated from the World Cup by a closed-source sensor.
FIFA says the Kinexon chip in the Trionda "proved" Matanović touched the ball. Absolute disgrace. What actually happened: they ran signal processing over 500Hz IMU data from a 14-gram sensor and isolated a supposed contact spike from thousands of noisy samples dominated by bladder harmonics, panel flex, spin wobble and stadium micro-tremors, then nullified one of the most dramatic World Cup equalizers in history via spectral analysis of what is essentially glorified noise.
Oh, and it gets better. They moved the chip this year. Back in 2022, it used to hang suspended in the center of the ball. Now it's glued into the sidewall of ONE panel, with counterweights stuffed into the other three so the ball doesn't fly like a shopping cart. So sensitivity now depends on which side of the ball the "contact" happens relative to the sensor. Totally fine basis for ending a nation's tournament.
An IMU measures acceleration. Somewhere in a proprietary pipeline, a threshold decides which acceleration counts as "touch." That threshold is unpublished. The false positive rate is unpublished. The calibration data is unpublished. The patents are literally still in their secrecy window. And FIFA owns the raw data, so nobody can independently audit the trace that ended Modrić's last World Cup.
And we're all supposed to accept a "heartbeat graphic" on the broadcast as if that settles anything.
Since we sadly all know you won't ever admit your crimes or remove this technology for good, at least open source the detection pipeline, @FIFAcom!
Publish the thresholds, the error rates, the raw IMU trace from last night. If the tech is right, transparency costs nothing, right?
The wider question is not whether or not Croatia’s goal was offside
But whether or not fans consented to this level of interference in the game
Consented to ignoring our own eyes and believing a technology that we don’t fully understand
Believing that sensor inside a ball which has been kicked around for 100 minutes can detect a strand of hair to the nearest millisecond
What’s to say it didn’t detect a bead of sweat in the air off Ruben Dias’ head as he pushed towards the ball, if it can detect a strand of hair?
The desperation to make an imperfect game perfect takes us further away from the one we fell in love with
Not a single person can believe that the decision to rule that goal out is for the betterment of the sport. It’s not why the offside rule was introduced, and it goes far beyond the “clear and obvious” errors that VAR was introduced to remove.
@CanadianKobzar@NGl0b0@jordanzakarin Not only that, but where is the second blip for the Portuguese player? They could've just put any random graph there and people have to take their word for it because nothing visually happened
🚨 Clubs Benefiting Most from VAR Errors This Season 👀
Arsenal — 18
Bournemouth — 7
Chelsea — 7
Fulham — 6
Manchester City — 6
Manchester United — 6
Aston Villa — 5
Brighton — 5
Newcastle — 5
Tottenham — 4
Wolves — 4
Brentford — 3
Liverpool — 3
West Ham — 3
Burnley — 2
Everton — 2
Leeds United — 2
Sunderland — 2
Crystal Palace — 1
Nottingham Forest — 1
@ClassicMiniFind@WestHam_Central First of all, Mark Clattenburg as your guideline is hilarious. Secondly, no one is saying it wasn't, he's saying that there's a double standard for arsenal here