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If the four-year gap between Fifa World Cups is a long time in soccer-related terms, the cycle represents an absolute eon when it comes to technology.
The internet was a niche curiosity at France 98, but by the time the tournament arrived in Japan and South Korea in 2002 it was a vital source of engagement. Subsequent quadrennial advances were driven by the mobile phone, smartphone and faster connectivity, all of which powered live streaming capabilities and a wide array of digital services that transformed how fans interacted with the world’s biggest sporting event.
At Brazil 2014 and Russia 2018, developments spilled onto the pitch, with Video Assistant Referees (VAR), Goal-line technology (GLT) and electronic performance and tracking systems (EPTS) transforming how the game was played.
Four years later in Qatar, these innovations were complemented by semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) – an early example of how intelligence could transform the World Cup.
But a simultaneous technological development happening elsewhere would have more lasting ramifications for sport. Qatar 2022 coincided with the debut of ChatGPT, which would eventually become the fastest adopted consumer service in history, transforming how people use the internet, sparking interest and debate in AI technology, and unleashing a new wave of intelligent services.
Four years on, AI is everywhere – including at the 2026 World Cup.
Harry Kane’s England are one of 48 teams in the expanded competition (Image credit: Getty Images)
An unparalleled global showcase
The very fact that ITV’s World Cup coverage in the UK is sponsored by Google’s Gemini AI tool highlights how mainstream AI has become – and how the battle to seize control of this nascent market is being played out not just behind the scenes but in public as well.
Tech companies across the board are looking to push their AI credentials in a bid to sell enterprise IT services and consumer electronics. For Chinese technology giant Lenovo, which signed up as Fifa’s global official technology partner in late 2024, the World Cup offers a platform to showcase how its full product portfolio is being used to deliver one of the world’s most high-profile sporting events.
Lenovo’s technology is integral if the biggest World Cup of all time – comprising 104 matches, three countries and four different time zones – is to go off without a hitch. Its remit covers everything from PCs, mobile phones and other devices through to IT equipment, services and cybersecurity, combining the roles of what previously would have been up to ten different tech vendors from a dedicated technology hub in Miami.
The messaging is simple: If Lenovo can do it for Fifa, Lenovo can do it for anyone.
“This is the most valuable real estate in the world,” says Jeff Shafer, Lenovo’s head of communications. “For seven minutes in every game you’re going to see Lenovo and Motorola [branding]. You’ll see us at the stadiums, the press conferences, and in the hands of the coaches and players when they’re using our tablets.
“We need to show people that we are not just a PC company anymore. We are the full stack provider [including] AI services and solutions, servers, storage infrastructure, smartphones, all different flavours of devices.”
Why AI is essential for biggest-ever World Cup
Behind the scenes, an intelligent command centre described as “mission control” for the tournament helps organisers make informed real-time decisions by bringing together previously siloed data into a single platform and applying an intelligence layer. Not only is this more efficient, but it is also essential for a tournament of this scale.
“If a flight’s late, or if the traffic pattern has changed, or there’s [adverse] weather conditions, those are things that can now come together where the planning can be much more dynamic – to be proactive around identifying those key risks and then making planning changes on the fly before those elevate into something even bigger,” explains Art Hu, Lenovo’s chief information officer.
“If we know a team is going to have trouble because of a delay or a change in schedule, we can actually, in real time, start the discussion on changing the calendar, so that we can manage the flow more smoothly.”
On top of this, AI is also being used to create digital twins of all 16 venues, making it easier for Fifa to visualise its real-time responses.
The intelligent command centre is arguably the most important but unglamorous piece of Lenovo’s AI puzzle. But both it and Fifa would largely prefer that soccer fans are unaware of its existence given the only way it would become noteworthy was if something went wrong.
Much more marketable and visible are other innovations that the two parties hope will transform the way soccer is played and watched.
Ref cam does it again 📹
— ITV Football (@itvfootball) June 14, 2026
Great angle of Nmecha's opener for Germany pic.twitter.com/hErMuo3Ivb
More accurate and transparent officiating
Referee cams, first deployed at the 2025 Fifa Club World Cup, are making live coverage more immersive by offering television viewers the opportunity to see important events from an on-pitch perspective. Lenovo’s AI-driven stabilisation tech will improve picture quality in real time, ensuring broadcast quality images are available moments after the event has occurred.
An additional benefit is that fans, and perhaps coaches, might see just how difficult it is for oft-maligned referees to make decisions when the pace of the game is so rapid.
“This is a very practical application of AI that is not abstract, it’s very real,” explains Hu. “This is going to give the audience a much [clearer] view of what referees are actually seeing on the pitch.”
Referees are aided in making these difficult decisions by Sony-owned Hawk-Eye’s AI-powered SAOT. First deployed four years ago, the technology uses a combination of stadium camera-based object recognition and ball-integrated sensors to track every player and the ball at any time on the field.
Although SAOT is an objective technology as opposed to the more subjective VAR, there have been complaints about a lack of transparency. To alleviate this issue, all 1,248 players at the 2026 World Cup have been digitally scanned to create a highly accurate digital avatar, allowing offside decisions to be displayed more realistically on big screens in the stadium and in broadcast feeds.
The hope is that more realistic avatars will make decisions easier to explain and inspire greater trust in the use of technology in soccer. Indeed, Lenovo says the models are so accurate that they require secure distribution methods to protect players’ biometric privacy.
“In the past you would see a generic avatar,” says Hu. “Now you will be able to see the lifelike dimensions with the right proportions of the players when that is happening.
“The scan itself is accurate down to the millimetre, which means things like the size of a player’s foot and the boot that they’re using are also captured.
“This is really going to support the referees in helping make their calls… because they are really under the gun for these complex refereeing decisions.”
That’s not to say all arguments have been settled, however. The image of a close, controversial onside call that led to a penalty being awarded to Switzerland in their opening game against Qatar was not made public, with Fifa claiming a technical error that prevented the system from generating a visual.
Democratising AI analysis
Historically, the biggest national associations have leveraged their financial resources to hire the best coaches, sports scientists and analysts to gain a competitive advantage in a game of tight margins. More recently, this has extended to analytics software and AI tools, raising concerns that less-resourced nations could be at a disadvantage if they cannot afford advanced technology or acquire the necessary experience.
One of Fifa and Lenovo’s initiatives is designed to level the playing field by giving all 48 countries a Generative AI-powered assistant. Fifa AI Pro is built on the governing body’s Football Language Model and trained on hundreds of millions of soccer-specific datapoints to generate visual and text insights that can be used to aid performance.
The interface allows players and coaches to submit queries in plain speech and supports multiple languages, something Fifa believes will have a great democratising impact.
“Every game, 2,000 metrics are collected multiple times every second,” says Hu. “Historically, turning that data into consistently actionable insight has been very intensive and time-consuming. Fifa AI Pro changes that.
“An analyst can actually recreate a key moment from a recent match and look at different angles to gain insights. Maybe they want to generate a heat map of player movements. Maybe they want to look at how compact a defence was, and how the spacing might have impacted possession times during the game.”
Even the official ball of the tournament is equipped with data-gathering sensor tech (Image credit: Getty Images)
Future AI plans
Of course, official partnerships are only part of the reason why this World Cup will be so AI-infused. Fans are now asking general purpose tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini questions about statistics, history and tactics – even if these are not trained in soccer-specific data. For many fans, AI has replaced search as their predominant means of information discovery – a huge shift from four years ago.
Similarly, AI image generation tools are helping to fuel the meme economy on social media and AI coding assistants are being used to create quizzes and fantasy games. AI will also be used widely by official broadcasters to create digital highlights and other content, as it has been for several previous tournaments.
One of the most controversial use cases of AI technology is dynamic ticket pricing, which alters the cost of entry depending on demand. Critics say it risks pricing out fans already facing significant travel, accommodation and matchday expenses if they want to watch in person.
Fan reaction to the use of AI and legislation against such practices in other countries could mean dynamic pricing doesn’t return in four years’ time, but other AI innovations are here to stay – and will likely be much more ambitious in scope.
Lenovo and Fifa are already working on plans for the 2027 Women’s World Cup, and AI is firmly part of the governing body’s own four-year development strategy. Agentic AI, which sees intelligent agents break down prompts into a series of tasks and then completes them autonomously, is one area that is set to become more common in future years. But other innovations will take time to be developed and will not necessarily fit in with the four-year World Cup cycle.
“We know that not all technology advances at the same pace,” says Hu. “There are certain things that become either more mature or cost efficient or ready for deployment at a particular time.
“As agents become more capable and more cost effective and easier to use, there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t go into other areas of football as well.
“Augmenting humans, compressing time, doing things faster, sifting through even more data for that valuable insight – those are the promising directions that we continue to explore both for right now and going into the future.”
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