In what must surely be the first ever instance of the successful bidders in a commercial tender being required to take out some form of insurance cover, FIFA’s selected goal-line technology providers Hawk-Eye and GoalRef (surely GoalsMan?) have been ordered to go away and take out some insurance, Insurance Times reporters read in the Daily Mail this week.
Why might the two firms need insurance?, you may wonder. The main reason of course is that – if wrongly calibrated – the laser technology used to judge whether a football has or has not crossed a goal-line (due to be introduced for Premier Ship League matches from next season) could potentially slice the likes Chelsea’s Pete Cheeks clean in half.
There is also a risk of being sued if balls were wrongly judged to have crossed or not to have crossed the goal-line to the prejudice of some club or other and its commercial interests. FIFA has insisted that the winning firms – who between them get to roll out their auto-adjudgative solutions worldwide (so presumably they are mounted on some kind of trolley) should sort themselves out with a policy that provides “sufficient insurance coverage for claims being raised by third parties due to the licensee’s activities or omissions (failure to act) as well as claims being raised due to potentially faulty (manufactured) products.”
FIFA goes on to stipulate that “the policy shall be concluded with a well-respected and reputable national or international insurance company”. The latter part of that stipulation obviously rules out all insurance companies operating on a purely regional basis. The former part rules out the rest.
Bit of a conundrum, really.
Hawkeye closes the deal with FIFA officials in Zurich
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