AFFA Now FIFA VAR Certified

Video Assistant Referee (VAR) Systems have gained more momentum and continue their triumph.

They are spreading across leagues, countries and sports worldwide, fulfilling the sport’s and viewer’s demand for more Fair Play and reliable decision-making during matches. A new member to these innovative associations is the Association of Football Federations of Azerbaijan (AFFA). AFFA is now FIFA certified VAR system user, recently gaining the FIFAs approval with VAR systems delivered by German-based systems integration company Broadcast Solutions.

Elkhan Samadov, AFFA’s VAR Project Manager and President of Azerbaijan Professional Football League, states: "We are delighted having VAR technology implemented for our football tournament starting with season 2022/2023. Struggling with covid-related restrictions and delays, we, together with Broadcast Solutions, have managed to finish the implementation within the given time frame. This was only possible because of the project teams’ professionality and result-oriented mindset."

The VAR implementation at AFFA comprised a two-part project with a mobile VAR system incorporated in a 3.5t transporter and 3 VAR rooms integrated into the offices of Baku’s Olympic Stadium. The mobile solution is used in cases where venues lack a fibre line connection to the VAR hub in the Olympic Stadium or distances are too wide. The mobile VAR solution offers three workplaces with an additional flightcase monitor placed at the sideline for the referees to review questionable scenes.

The VAR centre in Baku’s Olympic Stadium serves as a central VAR hub for all games of the Azerbaijan football league being reviewed. Therefore the majority of the venues are connected with the Olympic Stadium using a dedicated fibre connection. The three VAR rooms offer enough space for three video referees to work. Technically they access a separated Central Apparatus Room (CAR) with the possibility to cover three matches simultaneously. Each VAR system, the mobile and the fixed one are equipped to handle up to eight video signals per match.

AFFA and Broadcast Solutions together opted for the EVS Xeebra multi-camera review system. In total, four EVS Servers are running in the Baku Olympic Stadium. Also incorporated is Xeebra‘s integrated machine learning technology to automatically calibrate the field of play and produce a virtual offside line (VOL) in real-time.

The first use of the VAR systems begins with Azerbaijan’s first league football season starting this summer.

www.affa.az