Discursive Roles of the Semi-Automated Offside Technology's 3D Animations in FIFA World Cup 2022

Abstract

In this work, we look for a way to understand the role of the 3D animations to the fulfillment of the Semi-Automated Offside Technology's (SAOT) script (Akrich, 1992, 2014). We do so by observing the visual discourse (Schmidl, 2021) that is encrusted in football's media dispositif (Alzamora; d'Andréa; Ziller, 2018). At first, we define the concept of script, delimiting a corpus of text that matches it, then we look to the efforts to frame, through images (Goffman, 1974), the discourse by the sport's authorities. To accomplish that, we propose a brief case study of a particularly controversial SAOT use in the FIFA World Cup 2022.