The 2026 FIFA World Cup is taking over our stadiums, TVs, the news and social feeds -- and now the skies above Seattle, too. For the six soccer matches hosted in the city, Seattle is launching a drone show that includes something not seen in other drone displays: a scoreboard showing that day's team flags and final scores.

It's a technical feat that's riding an unexpected wave of interest and excitement around the World Cup being hosted in Canada, the US and Mexico -- particularly since the US is usually associated more with (American) football than fútbol. As cities like Boston, San Francisco and Houston compete for attention (and international tourists), Seattle's answer is to create a spectacle in the sky that can be enjoyed by visitors and locals alike.

I wanted to learn more about how a show like this with hundreds of drones gets off the ground, so I headed to a cordoned-off grass field at Seattle Center, a complex originally built to host the 1962 World's Fair where innovations such as the cordless phone were unveiled.

A drone show with a new twist

When Seattle residents and visitors look to the sky near the Space Needle, they'll see a 12-minute show that includes football (soccer) imagery, a giant whale tail batting a ball and icons celebrating the event.

What's different is a scoreboard showing the two flags of the teams that played that day and the final score, requiring custom changes for every show.

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The display runs on days when games are played in Seattle on June 15, June 19, June 24, June 26, July 1 and July 6. Each drone show happens once it's dark, which at this time of year in Seattle is quite late: 10 p.m. or later.

The show is the brainchild of Visit Seattle, a private, nonprofit organization that markets the benefits and attractions of the Emerald City. Jorge Gotuzzo, the World Cup activation lead for Visit Seattle, explained the appeal of the scoreboard idea. "Being able to provide a show like this one to people who are not able to go to a match, I think that was one of the big goals for us," he said, "but also to showcase Seattle on the big stage."

A coordinated aerial dance with 400 drones

To make the scoreboard idea a reality, Visit Seattle turned to Texas-based Sky Elements to build and execute a show using 400 drones. Unlike a consumer drone you might pilot in your backyard, the quadcopters used here are specially designed for drone shows and include just the flight mechanics and a massive 10,000-lumen light, which is about equal to a car's headlight.

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They also have sophisticated GPS systems that can keep them within a centimeter of where they're supposed to be in the air, said Preston Ward, chief pilot and general counsel of Sky Elements. In the sky, they operate about six feet apart.

Though 400 drones are a lot, that's nothing compared to the company's bigger shows. One above San Diego Comic-Con for the movie Deadpool vs. Wolverine in 2024 set the world record at the time with 2,400 drones, 300 of which carried pyrotechnics. The following year, a Netflix show to spotlight Stranger Things involved 5,000 drones. Ward said a large show can include 10,000 drones.

"Just about everything we do is a custom show, start to finish, and we rarely reuse formation," said Ward, which means every show ends up being a "one-off bespoke event."

Although each show has a single pilot, they're not directing the quadcopters with a set of joysticks. Everything in a drone show is modeled well ahead of time in software. He estimated that Sky Elements animators spent 80 to 100 hours building the full presentation, where each drone's flight path and light color are animated by hand.

"It's all preprogrammed, so it's preplanned, and once we hit go, we can't change those plans that are going to happen," said Ward.

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But including that day's game score adds a new variable: Sky Elements has to wait for the final score and then incorporate it into the sequence. For most games, that isn't a problem: On the day I visited, they had about eight hours between the end of the match and the show to receive the updated flight data and load it onto the drones.

That might be more tricky on June 26 when Iran and Egypt kick off at 8 p.m. PT, leaving much less time between the final whistle and that evening's show. Kyle Pivnick, vice president of Sky Elements, said his team will be on standby watching the game so they can update the animation and send it over to the pilot in Seattle "as soon as it is safe, compliant and ready." It's scheduled to start at 10:45 p.m.

Setting up the show

All that preproduction makes the scene on the ground ahead of time look pretty tranquil. When I arrived a few hours ahead of that night's show, the drones were stacked six high on folding tables while Sky Elements crew members waited for word to start setting up. It takes between six and eight hours to get everything set up, and about two hours to clean up at the end of the night.

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Just two laptops run the show, a primary and a backup computer, connected via Ethernet cable to wireless base stations that communicate with the copters via Wi-Fi. A Starlink Mini provides internet access to the setup.

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"It's enterprise-grade networking equipment, so we could probably run a small office building off of what we have out here," said Ward. "It's very unique, and we overdo it, [but] we want to make sure all that communication is going to be reliable on the ground and in the air."

While there was still daylight to work in, the crew carried the drone stacks out to the field. Under the direction of Sky Elements pilot Cole Thompson, who ran the show, the drones were positioned in a 10-by-40 grid.

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After some troubleshooting and tests, the field was ready and waiting for the final show files to be sent from the animators in Texas. When those arrived, it got loaded onto the drones over the local Wi-Fi network Sky Elements set up.

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"Once we start the show, everything's locked in, from the position to the colors," said Ward. When the sky finally got dark enough, the show began with an expansive buzz of 1,600 propellers, lifting off in four layers that glided east to hover above a closed stadium (for safety). The drones displayed a multicolor layer of waves and a giant whale tail that slowly flexed to slap a soccer ball. 

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Then the drones reorganized themselves invisibly to reveal the flags of that day's teams, Egypt and Belgium, and the tied score of 1-1 below them. Since the drones move freely in 3D space, the flags appeared to ripple in the air. The show wrapped up with a glittering Seattle skyline, the Seattle logo of the games featuring the Space Needle on a football pitch and the words "Let's Go SEA 26" and finally "See You Soon" in giant script. 

The flags and the words were all repeated in reverse, so people viewing from the north could also read the messages.

Four more shows are planned while the World Cup is in town: June 24, June 26, July 1 and July 6. Each show is scheduled to start at 10 p.m. PT, except for the June 26 one that will lift off at 10:45 p.m.

"We wanted to create something never done before," said Gotuzzo, "a once-in-a-lifetime show that would highlight this opportunity in front of millions of people abroad [and] also the thousands of people who are coming here for the World Cup."