Soccer has finally come to its senses.

After years of discussion and debate, the sport has at long last approved the use of goal-line technology at all levels of the game. Thursday's decision by the International Football Association Board will all but end flubbed calls that have decided games as monumental as the World Cup final and made the sport look embarrassingly Jurassic in a hyper-connected age of instant replay and instant communication.

The IFAB approved systems made by the British firm Hawk-Eye and the Danish-German venture GoalRef. Both have been extensively proven in tests with ball cannons and mannequins before being thoroughly shaken down in matches. The two systems alert a referee within one second when a ball has crossed the goal line, eradicating absurd blunders like Frank Lampard's phantom goal for England in the 2010 World Cup finals against Germany, which was clearly over the line yet still disallowed.

We'll see the tech on the pitch as early as December in the FIFA Club World Cup and in most major leagues beginning next year. And it'll definitely be in place for the 2014 World Cup. FIFA, the sport’s governing body, at first opposed the tech but abruptly changed course after the England vs. Germany blunder.

"Today is a historic day for international football and for the IFAB," FIFA President Sepp 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."

It's long past due.

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Elite Soccer Players Are Smarter Than You AreHawk-Eye uses 14 cameras placed high on each end of the stadium, while GoalRef makes use of a chip inside the ball and a magnetic field around the goalposts. Both technologies send a signal to the ref’s watch within a second, indicating a goal. Although GoalRef is relatively cheaper to implement, installation costs are estimated at $150,000 to $200,000 per stadium.

The NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball have long used technology to settle scoring disputes. But soccer has needed a definitive means of deciding since at least 1966, when England beat West Germany 4-2 in the World Cup final at Wembley. In one of soccer’s most controversial calls ever, a shot by England striker Geoff Hurst hit the underside of the crossbar, deflected and was dubiously called over the line for England’s second goal.

The Lampard blunder raised a lot of hackles and made all but the staunchest Luddite realize soccer had to get with the times. A handful of other high-profile missed calls have been awarded, or ruled out, as referees have tried to keep their eyes on the ball. Even after the two systems were successfully tested in real-world matches in England and Denmark, we saw yet another example of why the technology is so desperately needed. During June’s European Championship, England’s John Terry appeared to save his team a goal against host country Ukraine. Replays, however, showed the ball had, by the narrowest of margins, crossed the goal line by the time he reached it. (Replays also showed that Ukraine was offside in the buildup, which, had that been correctly called as well, would have rendered the whole play moot anyway.)

What lent this situation particular poignancy was that the head of the tournament’s organizing body — former great Michel Platini, president of the Union of European Football Associations — is a staunch critic of goal-line technology. Instead, he added an extra official to stand on each goal line, tasked only with ruling definitively on any goal-line situations. And in this case, the official on the goal line did not call it a goal.

“It's not goal-line technology in itself,” Platini told the Daily Mail. “I am against technology coming into force to actually make decisions. It invades every single area. If tomorrow someone handballs it on the line and the referee doesn't see it, what then?”

He's got nothing to worry about. It's taken decades for soccer to get this far, so don't expect the sport to become increasingly wired anytime soon — a point the IFAB made clear.

"None of us are considering any type of technology which would interfere with the free-flowing nature of our game," Alex Horne, England Football Association’s General Secretary and a member of the IFAB, told Reuters. "We do not believe it is appropriate for technology to creep out into other areas, we are deliberately drawing a line and saying that goal line technology is where it stops."