February 15 – Football’s lawmakers are to consider allowing players to wear electronic chips to avoid heart failures such as the one suffered by Fabrice Muamba last year.
The International Football Association Board (IFAB) will discuss at its annual meeting on March 2 in Edinburgh whether to run a trial of such a system.
IFAB, the only body which can change the laws of the game, consists of the FAs of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland who get a vote each, and FIFA, which has four.
“We are looking at whether there are medical benefits, such as whether it can warn of problems such as Fabrice Muamba suffered, which would make it a no brainer for this to come in,” Scottish FA chief executive Stewart Regan told the Press Association.
“We are trying to consider whether or not things can make a positive difference in the game rather than just another example of technology being brought in.”
Explaining how the system would work, Regan added: “There is a chip in the shirt at the back of the player’s neck and the data is fed back into a laptop.”
Muamba, who played for Bolton Wanderers, collapsed during an FA Cup tie at Tottenham in March last year. His heart stopped for 78 minutes and five months later he announced his retirement from professional football.
Although FIFA have invited Muamba to take on an ambassador’s role, they may not be keen to support Regan’s idea. Sepp Blatter has embraced goal-line technology, but he has made it clear he is anxious for technology not to spill over into other areas of the game.
But Regan said: “There is one school of thought that it’s a pure game and shouldn’t be any technology and another that thinks if you can make players medically safer why shouldn’t it be considered?”
Other issues being discussed by IFAB include a clarification of the offside rule, a report on goal-line technology and IFAB’s own decision-making role, a source of irritation for a number of non-British federations who believe the make-up of IFAB, enshrined in FIFA’s statutes, is now an anachronism.
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