The World's Largest Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

There are moments when technology transforms an industry, and others when it changes the way society experiences a cultural phenomenon. The 2026 FIFA World Cup represented precisely the latter.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, football was understood primarily as a sport played by eleven against eleven. By the turn of the century, its importance as a global business had become equally evident, involving a wide range of stakeholders—from sponsors and multinational brands to audiences and broadcasting rights holders. Today, however, a new conversation has emerged, one whose implications we are only beginning to understand: football has become one of the world's largest laboratories for artificial intelligence (AI).

When people think about AI in sports, the first images that usually come to mind are the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) or semi-automated offside technology. Yet these tools barely scratch the surface of a much deeper transformation. During the most recent FIFA World Cup, hosted by Mexico, Canada, and the United States, artificial intelligence became the invisible infrastructure underpinning the world's most celebrated sporting event.

While a striker decides in a fraction of a second where to send the ball, thousands of algorithms are simultaneously making decisions of an entirely different nature: reconstructing the exact three-dimensional position of every player, identifying the precise instant when a foot makes contact with the ball, stabilizing video captured by the referee's body camera, generating real-time statistics for commentators and coaching staff, and detecting hate speech directed at players on social media before they ever have a chance to see it. All of these systems operate simultaneously, and none of them existed just a few years ago.

FIFA turned this World Cup into the largest public demonstration of artificial intelligence applied to sport. Behind every match operated an extraordinary technological infrastructure: sixteen optical cameras positioned around the stadium continuously tracked every player's movements. This information was combined with sensors embedded inside the match ball capable of transmitting hundreds of measurements every second. Computer vision models then reconstructed the entire match in three dimensions, providing referees with a level of precision far beyond the capabilities of the human eye.

What was truly remarkable was not simply the amount of technology deployed, but the way it had begun to disappear from view. The best technologies are those that no longer feel like technology. No one gets into a car thinking about the hundreds of microprocessors coordinating the engine—they simply drive. The same is now happening in football: AI is no longer a spectacle separate from the game; it has become part of the game itself.

However, it is important to remember that what we are witnessing today began taking shape several years ago. The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar served as a massive experimental laboratory. During that tournament, FIFA deployed twelve specialized cameras capable of tracking twenty-nine body points for every player fifty times per second, alongside a smart ball equipped with inertial sensors that recorded the exact moment of every touch. The objective was never to replace referees, but rather to reduce the uncertainty that has historically surrounded some of football's most controversial decisions—decisions that have shaped the sport's history, from Diego Maradona's infamous "Hand of God" to countless disputed penalty calls. Years later, that technology has evolved from being an innovation into becoming a platform. The distinction may seem subtle, but it fundamentally changes the conversation.

Four years later, AI is no longer limited to determining whether a player is offside. It now powers tactical analysis systems for national teams, generates three-dimensional visualizations for live broadcasts, produces advanced statistics for sports journalists, automates the creation of thousands of social media clips, and enables coaches, analysts, and commentators to consult intelligent assistants trained exclusively on football data.

One of the most compelling developments has been Football AI Pro, the new assistant introduced by FIFA in partnership with Lenovo. Beyond its commercial branding, it is arguably the first large language model designed exclusively for football knowledge. Rather than answering questions using general information from the internet, the system consults hundreds of millions of official records to generate tactical analyses, explanations, visualizations, and customized reports for participating national teams. In doing so, AI moves beyond simply answering questions to beginning to "think" about football.

Despite AI's growing omnipresence, human oversight remains indispensable. Refereeing decisions continue to depend on trained officials, while tactical analysis remains the responsibility of coaches. Data still require the context that only human intelligence can provide, and experience remains irreplaceable. Nevertheless, the balance between people and algorithms is shifting at remarkable speed, with implications that extend far beyond the world of sports.

For years, it was said that data were the new oil. Today, however, that metaphor no longer goes far enough. Data are no longer merely the fuel—they have become the language itself. AI speaks that language better than any individual, and the World Cup has become one of the arenas where this new language reaches its fullest expression. Yet while this revolution unfolds inside stadiums, another transformation of equal significance is taking place beyond them. The World Cup no longer ends when the referee blows the final whistle. In many ways, that is when it truly begins.

Until recently, FIFA was the primary producer of content surrounding its flagship event. Broadcasters narrated the matches, newspapers wrote the match reports, and a handful of commentators shaped the public conversation in the days that followed. That model has now been fundamentally transformed. While a football match lasts only ninety minutes, the conversation surrounding it can continue for weeks. The narratives are no longer crafted solely by journalists or media organizations. Today, millions of people—often assisted by AI—actively participate in writing the story of global sports entertainment.

For the first time, virtually any fan can produce content whose quality would have been reserved only a few years ago for a creative agency or an international broadcaster. A photograph taken with a smartphone can become a cinematic poster. A controversial play can be transformed into a hyper-realistic animation. A supporter can ask an AI platform to narrate a goal using the voice of a legendary commentator, generate an anime-style version of the play, recreate the action from any camera angle, or produce a video combining humor, statistics, and special effects—all within minutes. The boundary between consumer and creator has all but disappeared. And when the barriers to content creation disappear, the entire economics of content changes with them.

This phenomenon is unprecedented. While FIFA refined its computer vision systems to improve refereeing decisions, millions of people simultaneously used generative AI models to reinterpret those very same moments from entirely different perspectives. A goal no longer existed only once—it existed thousands of times: as a vertical video on TikTok, a meme on Instagram, an interactive graphic on LinkedIn, an AI-generated recreation on YouTube, or a conversational AI summary before the post-match press conference had even concluded. Every match generated hundreds of parallel narratives competing for users' attention.

This creative explosion is also transforming the way the media produce content. Just a few years ago, their competitive advantage consisted of being the first outlet to report a match result. Today, that advantage has virtually disappeared, because the news is no longer the score itself; the real value lies in explaining the meaning of that result better than anyone else.

Sports newsrooms no longer use AI solely to write short news stories or summarize post-match press conferences. They now optimize its use to identify tactical patterns, uncover historical trends, automatically locate the best plays among thousands of hours of video, generate interactive visualizations, and analyze databases that no journalist could manually review during real-time coverage. Paradoxically, the more powerful AI becomes, the more valuable human judgment becomes, because while algorithms find patterns, people find meaning. That difference will probably become journalism's main competitive advantage over the next decade.

The same thing is happening with brands. For a long time, sports sponsorship consisted of placing a logo around the pitch and hoping that millions of people would see it during ninety minutes of play. Today, however, that is no longer enough. Brands compete to participate in the conversation, not merely in the broadcast. AI enables them to generate thousands of versions of the same campaign adapted to different languages, platforms, audiences, and even communication styles. A single goal can give rise to hundreds of different advertising pieces depending on who receives them. Never before has it been possible to personalize sports marketing with such a level of precision.

In an ambivalent way, the same AI capable of producing extraordinary content can also manufacture extraordinarily convincing disinformation. During this World Cup, fake videos circulated showing players performing actions that never happened, synthetic commentaries that were difficult to distinguish from the originals, and hyper-realistic images that millions of users shared before verifying their authenticity. What is worrying is not only the quality of these fabrications. It is the speed at which they can travel around the world before anyone has the opportunity to debunk them. AI has drastically reduced the cost of producing information, but, as a counterpart, it has also reduced the cost of producing disinformation. This changes the rules of the game for journalists, digital platforms, sponsors, sports governing bodies, and, of course, for the fans themselves.

Perhaps for this reason, one of the least visible—but most significant—developments of this World Cup has been the use of AI to protect the players themselves. Systems capable of analyzing millions of social media posts identified hate speech, threats, or discriminatory content in order to prevent it from reaching footballers, coaches, and referees directly. It is a quiet application of AI that rarely makes headlines, yet it will probably have a far greater impact on the human experience of the tournament than many of the most spectacular technological innovations.

But if AI already decides what we see, how we see it, when we see it, and who shows it to us, why are we still talking only about technology? The conversation must inevitably shift toward culture, economics, influence, and even the model through which societies build collective conversations. The true legacy of this World Cup will be that it demonstrated AI has ceased to be a tool that accompanies sport and has become an infrastructure that redefines the entire experience surrounding sport.

More than being remembered solely for the champion that lifted the trophy, this World Cup will be remembered as the moment when we stopped asking whether AI would change football and began asking how football was helping change our relationship with AI. In the end, the story has never been about algorithms. It has always been—and will continue to be—about people. The difference is that now people share the conversation with millions of AI systems that write, translate, summarize, edit, recommend, create, and amplify stories alongside us. The ball remains the same; what has changed forever is everything that happens around it.