Spain eyes goal technology in two or three years
Spain hopes to follow the Premier League's lead and introduce goal-line technology inside two to three years, La Liga chief executive Francisco Roca said on Thursday.
The English top flight adopted the British Hawk-Eye system on Thursday and will use it from next season while world football's ruling body FIFA has approved German-based GoalControl for this year's Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
"We are in favour of the system," Roca told delegates at the Soccerex European Forum. "We are not going to be so quick with goalline technology as the Premier League.
"But I expect in the next two or three years to do something like this either with technology that we buy or maybe with technology that we create because we already have a system in place that can do something like this.
"We need to see which system is less expensive to put together or to maintain."
Roca said Spain was looking at technology to improve offside decisions as well as those that tell the referee whether the ball has crossed the line for a goal.
"We've seen especially... in the last few weeks the real problems that referees have differentiating when it is an offside position," he added.
"Right now the technology is there, we can come up with solutions to help referees to make good calls and not bad calls."
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Roca said Spain already used a system of cameras in stadiums that were monitored by the league.
"We started technological development three or four years ago, we came up with a system in which we measure our competition with video cameras in a central way," he said.
"Everybody sees what happens with everybody else. We have that in place which is a huge investment but which is working extremely well."
Former vice-chairman of Arsenal and the English FA, David Dein, welcomed the green light for technology in the Premier League and urged others to follow suit.
"It's going to make the game fairer for the big decisions and every league should [have it]," he told delegates. "It might be expensive but there is enough money swishing around, we've got to get those big decisions right."