Belda.
CREDIT: FRANCISCO BELDA
In 1996, Spanish physician Francisco Belda blew the whistle on soccer referees with a study showing that the human eye was too slow to judge offsides in many play situations. Now, a Madrid court has called a foul on the authors of a 1998 Lancet paper, ruling that it was a knock-off of Belda's work.
Belda wrote up his research in the magazine of the Spanish Royal Football Federation in December 1996. When he later saw a "similar" paper in The Lancet titled "Oculomotor movements and football's Law 11," Belda sued the authors, including Jaime Sanabria, an otoneurologist at Fundación Jiménez Díaz in Madrid.
Belda's article attributes wrong offside decisions to the time it takes for the eye to shift from one visual target to another. (An offside occurs if a player is nearer to his opponents' goal line than to the ball, unless there are at least two opposition players between him and the goal line.) "Because the eye can't move quickly enough, the referee cannot simultaneously see the exact location of all the players around the ball as it is passed on," he explains. Sanabria could not be reached for comment.
In its ruling last December, the court asked the defendants to compensate Belda and ordered The Lancet to publish the verdict. Belda is asking the journal to print his original work along with the ruling. The Lancet says it hasn't yet decided how or whether it will comply.
