Behold the second place where soccer and technology shall meet in 2012. On Thursday, the International Football Association Board approved goal-line technology to stop refereeing blunders.

Two systems, one created by the British Hawk-Eye and one by the Danish-German GoalRef, have been approved. Both alert a referee within one second that a ball has passed the goal line.

The FIFA Club World Cup this December will likely be the first showing of this technology, and it will definitely be on the pitch for the 2014 World Cup.

Hawk-Eye has 14 cameras placed on each end of the stadium, and GoalRef uses a chip place inside the ball that communicates with a magnetic field around the goalposts. They'll both send a signal to the referee's watch, and cost $200,000 and $150,000, respectively.

The first blunder that had the IFAB considering the move was the Frank Lampard disallowed goal in the 2010 World Cup, but a few more mistakes since then have solidified the support for it.

"Today is a historic day for international football and for the IFAB," FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter said in an interview published on the FIFA website. "It's a very modern decision to apply this to football. It is so important because the objective of football is to score goals. With the new techniques and the new tactics, it's difficult to score goals, so it helps to use technology to help identify when a goal is scored. It's a help to the referee. There was a call for this technology and now I can say that we did it."

Via Wired