Following Robin Van Persie’s controversial sending off in the recent Champions League defeat to Barcelona, football’s world governing body has hurriedly attempted to call back a brand new line of malfunctioning robotic officials.
The ‘Massimo Busacca’ MK-1000 model, used in the recent fixture between Arsenal and Barcelona, sent off Robin Van Persie for kicking the ball away – despite the fact that the time between the whistle for offside being blown and impact with the ball from the Dutch striker was less than a second.
This defect in the ‘Sensory Decision Making Technology’ (SDMT) has been put down to an automatic resetting to ‘starting block mode’. These highly intelligent machines had been wheeled out into more minor footballing arenas around the world, but until now had not been used in any high profile or televised matches.
The problems with the machines vary in significance. For example, there have been reports of the referee in a game between Vasco de Gama and Gremio in Brazil switching to Russian speaking mode, whilst Dartford versus Maidenhead was abandoned due to the officials becoming vigilante aggressors and joining forces to form a Megazord. But the SDMT defects were not isolated to the Nou Camp; one robo-ref ruptured a hole in time and space by disallowing a goal five minutes before the ball didn’t cross the line, plunging the entirety of Huddersfield into chasm of plasma and dark matter, creating a black hole in the North of England.
FIFA boss Sepp Blatter is understood to be delighted with the news as he has opted to adopt the robotic officials as his own to live with him. “I am obviously very upset that ‘Project Howard Schwarzewebber’ has not worked, but the people asked for use of technology in the game and that’s what we gave them and, as I predicted, it didn’t work out, so there you have it. The robots will live with me in my palace and compete in penalty shoot-outs to the death against Mark Bosnich who recently sold his soul to me for occasional appearances on ITV and ESPN.”
