From AI-powered tactical analysis and digital player avatars to an intelligent command centre connecting operations across North America, football’s governing body and technology partner Lenovo are leveraging artificial intelligence to transform how the game is played, managed, and experienced. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

For 90 minutes, Cape Verde frustrated Spain.

One of the tournament favourites monopolised possession, unleashed 27 shots and spent much of the afternoon camped around its opponent’s penalty area. But when the final whistle arrived at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the scoreboard still read 0-0.

It was one of the early surprises of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and, in many ways, the perfect rebuttal to critics who feared the expanded 48-team tournament would produce more one-sided group-stage mismatches.

Behind the goals, packed stadiums and global television audiences, this World Cup has become an unprecedented technology experiment. From AI-powered tactical analysis and digital player avatars to an intelligent command centre connecting operations across North America, football’s governing body and technology partner Lenovo are leveraging artificial intelligence to transform how the game is played, managed, and experienced.

“This is the first ever largest event on the globe that is so technologically powered,” Asia Sheikh, the Global CTO, Sports & Entertainment Technology Innovation at Lenovo, told Sportstar. “This is the first AI-native sporting event of its kind.”

At the heart of that vision is Football AI Pro, a platform developed jointly by FIFA and Lenovo that provides all 48 participating nations with access to advanced tactical analysis.

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Historically, football’s richest teams and federations have enjoyed significant advantages through larger coaching staffs, proprietary data systems and teams of analysts. Football AI Pro aims to narrow that gap by turning vast amounts of football data into tactical reports, video breakdowns and visual insights available to every team. The system draws on millions of FIFA-owned data points and thousands of football-specific metrics, helping coaches identify patterns, tendencies and potential tactical adjustments.

For FIFA, the objective extends beyond simply creating a better analytics tool.

“We are ensuring that innovation benefits every player, every team, and every fan everywhere in the world and, of course, benefits the greatest game of all, football,” FIFA president Gianni Infantino had said while introducing the initiative.

For the first time, analysts from Cape Verde can access the same tactical insights available to Spain. Iraq can prepare for France using the same analytical framework employed by football’s traditional powers.

“FIFA has brought the knowledge, the expertise, their analyst, their coaches, and we built this whole agentic AI layer on top of it. Today, 48 teams have the same data. All coaches can see the same thing that is happening,” says Sheikh.

If Football AI Pro represents AI’s influence on the sport itself, the technology’s most ambitious contribution sits miles away from the nearest touchline.

Located in Miami, the company’s Intelligent Command Centre functions as what Sheikh describes as the World Cup’s “central nervous system”. It connects venue operations, transportation networks, security systems, weather services and hundreds of other data streams across 16 venues, three countries and more than 200 training locations.

Before this tournament, many of those operations relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets, messaging platforms and disconnected software systems.

“What it does is that it has an AI agentic layer built on Lenovo’s hybrid AI platform,” Sheikh explains. “We connect all the systems and give predictive analysis.”

Convincing stakeholders, however, was not always straightforward.

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“I used to walk in with some ideas, and I used to get rejected,” Sheikh, a former professional cricketer, recalls. “Today, those exact ideas are live.”

Its importance became evident during France’s group-stage match against Iraq in Philadelphia. Severe thunderstorms and lightning forced a delay of almost two hours, creating the first major weather disruption of the tournament. Organisers had to manage crowd safety, venue operations, transport logistics and communications while complying with strict American lightning protocols. Rather than relying solely on manual coordination, officials could monitor and manage the response through a single integrated platform, while fans inside the stadium were kept informed and alerted via the official FIFA app.

“They don’t have to call probably 30 teams and say, here is your next action item,” Sheikh says. “The command centre actually automatically does all the next steps for them. Every venue is connected, every traffic system is connected, every weather system is connected. The command centre is our biggest product that has changed and revolutionised the entire game, the World Cup 2026.”

For Sheikh, the lesson extends beyond football. Large sporting events increasingly test not just stadiums but entire urban ecosystems.

“When an event comes to a venue, the entire city becomes a venue,” she says.

Perhaps the most visible application of AI has come in one of football’s most contentious areas: officiating.

Offside decisions have sparked debate for as long as the law has existed. At this World Cup, FIFA has introduced a new generation of AI-generated player avatars designed to make those decisions easier to understand.

Before the tournament, all 1,248 players underwent rapid body scans that created highly detailed digital replicas. Combined with semi-automated offside technology and sensor-equipped match balls, the system allows officials to generate lifelike visualisations of incidents for both referees and supporters. The avatars are so detailed that they replicate a player’s body shape and physical appearance rather than relying on generic digital figures.

“When the teams arrive, we scan them,” Sheikh says. “Before, it used to be some cartoon character. You don’t know whether it’s Messi or Ronaldo. Now we are actually building the 3D avatar which replicates their skin tones and physical features.”

The technology, however, cannot eliminate controversy entirely.

“Fans will still curse. Fans are never happy, especially when decisions are not in favour of their team,” Sheikh says with a laugh. “But we wanted to bring more transparency to fans sitting both inside and outside the stadium.”

FIFA and Lenovo hope greater transparency will at least help supporters understand how decisions are reached. The technology has already attracted interest from other sporting bodies looking to replicate similar systems in their own competitions.

Away from the pitch, AI is also helping unlock one of football’s richest yet least exploited assets: its history.

The sport possesses decades of video footage, photographs and archival material scattered across servers and storage systems. According to Sheikh, AI is helping transform those archives into personalised content, fan experiences and new revenue opportunities.

“The amount of video archives, the amount of content that each team and league has, you won’t believe,” she says. “We are using technology to monetise this, to bring more content to the fan.”

The project required close collaboration between football and technology experts. Lenovo engineers worked alongside FIFA analysts, coaches and operational staff for more than 18 months, refining ideas and adapting systems to the realities of the world’s biggest sporting event.

Sheikh says technology alone was never the challenge.

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“You can put the best technology, but if you don’t know how to use it, it is of no use,” she says. “Nothing was done without the experts sitting in our room. Sometimes we don’t know who’s FIFA and who’s Lenovo. It is such a strong partnership.”

For Lenovo, the World Cup is also a proving ground. The company believes many of the technologies deployed across North America can eventually be adapted for cricket, basketball, baseball and other major sporting events.

“If we can do it for the FIFA World Cup, we can do it for anyone,” Sheikh says. “I am talking to cricket boards, and I am excited to bring all this to the cricket world. Post the World Cup, once we get some breather, that’s the plan, that we go and strategise this.”

Whether it is helping Cape Verde analyse Spain, explaining an offside decision involving Lionel Messi through a digital avatar or coordinating a thunderstorm response in Philadelphia, the technology often fades into the background until it is needed.

The stars still decide the matches. But at World Cup 2026, artificial intelligence and technology are increasingly shaping everything around them.

Published on Jun 26, 2026