Liga MX became the first league in the Americas to deploy Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT) this season. What emerged from the experience goes beyond officiating. At WFS Mexico City 2026, Harry Lennard, Director of Officiating Operations at Genius Sports, and José Luis Chávez, VAR Manager at the Federación Mexicana de Fútbol, explained how a tool built to make faster and fairer decisions is also generating new commercial opportunities for the league and its broadcasters.
What the technology does
SAOT, powered by Genius Sports’ GeniusIQ platform, replaces the manual process of drawing offside lines on a two-dimensional image with an automated system that tracks up to 10,000 surface data points per player per second, records at 100 frames per second across 28 iPhones installed in each stadium, and produces a 3D render of the offside decision within seconds. No human places the lines. No operator introduces inconsistency.
The results from the 2026 Clausura are specific. Of 519 potential offside situations across the season, the system participated in 106. Average decision time dropped by around 25%. The fastest reviews came in at 39 seconds, against a previous benchmark of around 70. “We have the result, and the enrichment of that process is valuable for everyone,” said Chávez.
The decision visual as commercial inventory
Offside decisions are among the most contested moments in football. Fans watch them, debate them and share them. That emotional charge is precisely what makes the broadcast visual that accompanies them commercially valuable. The 3D render showing the players, the ball and the offside plane is not just a tool for transparency. It is a moment of guaranteed, high-intensity audience attention with a defined visual format, appearing at exactly the point when engagement peaks.
According to Lennard, Liga MX has reached an agreement to sell advertising space within that decision visual. “It unlocks a new revenue stream and makes it a more viable solution for leagues,” he said. What was previously dead air during a VAR check has become sponsorable inventory.
The same GeniusIQ platform also enables augmented broadcasts, integrating real-time data directly into the live feed: shot speeds, player names, pitch minimaps, tackle counts. Each of those data points is a potential sponsorship placement, triggered automatically by what is happening on the pitch. When the system detects a shot on goal, it serves the speed statistic and the associated sponsor activation simultaneously, without any manual intervention.
Genius Sports’ Moment Engine enables Liga MX sponsors to activate campaigns immediately after a goal, a save or a substitution, across live broadcasts, digital platforms and streaming services. Already deployed across the NFL and NBA, it identifies the moment of highest audience engagement and delivers branded content at precisely that point. A sponsor buying into the decision visual is buying a format that looks the same every time, with no human involvement in placing the lines.
“It enriches not just the technology area itself, but the commercial and financial dimensions, and ultimately gives the entire organisation a much more robust strategy,” said Chávez.
How Mexico got there
The Liga MX deployment did not happen overnight. Lennard described a process that required coordinating infrastructure across venues with different capabilities, training a third-party VAR operator, Mediapro, alongside the federation’s own officiating staff, and developing cooling systems for the iPhones recording at 4K in a climate the hardware was not designed for. “Things you don’t necessarily consider at the start of a project come around quick,” he said.
What made the launch work, by his account, was the consistency of communication throughout, with the federation, with clubs, with broadcasters and with the media. “Transparency and trust go hand in hand,” he said. The 25% reduction in decision times is the result. Trust in the system is what makes those numbers commercially meaningful.
How far should automation go?
The question came up directly at the panel, and Lennard’s answer was more philosophical than technical. His view is that there is a clear line between decisions that are objective, where the ball is, whether a player is offside, and decisions that require interpretation. The first category is where automation belongs. The second is where the referee remains irreplaceable.
“You still need a referee to make a decision on the football pitch,” he said. “You still need to allow them to discharge their professional judgment. The technology should be there to support them with things that are black or white.”
That line, however, is moving. Lennard acknowledged that within IFAB and FIFA there is growing appetite for automating anything that produces an objective outcome, and that the debates around where to draw the limit will intensify over the next few years. “I think in five years’ time we probably will be saturated,” he said. “And then it will be about honing and intensifying the process.”
Chávez was looking further ahead still. For him, the deeper opportunity is not just faster decisions but a fundamentally different relationship between the game and the fan, one in which the data generated by the technology becomes the basis for new forms of engagement that go well beyond the broadcast. The infrastructure being built today in Liga MX is, in his view, the foundation for something that has not yet been fully defined.
That process is already generating revenue. The debate about how far it should go is only beginning.
