FIFA unfurled its AI strategy for the upcoming FIFA World Cup this week, and it could see dominant powerhouses and first-timers be granted access to the same analytical data points as the global body is experimenting its Football AI Pro being made available to each of the 48 teams.
Usually, Artifical Intelligence is very meddlesone, but FIFA insists granting similar access to all teams will democratise strategising. The enterprise model seems altruistic, but the deployment remains to be seen.
AINews reported that FIFA was planning to unleash AI-enabled 3D player avatars, and a next-generation Referee View besides the Football Pro. The Football AI Pro is a generative AI knowledge assistant that will be made available to all 48 teams, dipping into FIFA’s considerable Football Language Model and trained on hundreds of millions of FIFA-owned data points. ‘It generates pre- and post-match analysis in text, video, graphs and 3D visualisations, supports prompts in multiple languages, and will not be used during live play,’ AINews wrote.
FIFA is pitching it as a democratising tool because access to sophisticated match analysis is not uniform and hinges on a team’s money wherewithal. So while the football elite have dedicated analytics wings, newcomers, some dot island nations, might not. ‘Football AI Pro is designed to give every team the same analytical baseline,’ AINEWS wrote.
Software giants have been working on extensive models to trap date emerging from 48 teams, 104 matches and 180 broadcasters. Lenovo nicked the deal for this enterprise architecture.
AINews also reported that the referee camera hitherto used for transparency of proceedings, and not exactly for TV purposes (given nostrils and bulge eyes and out of focus faces appear on it), will now be “framed for broadcast terms” to look good on screen. AI-powered stabilisation, AINews said, will smoothen footage captured from the referee’s body camera in real time, reducing the motion blur that made the original version hard to watch during fast play.
“The more significant purpose is transparency. VAR has been one of the most contested technologies in football, partly because the decision-making process is difficult for fans to follow and partly because the imagery used to communicate those decisions has often been unclear. Better referee footage, delivered in real time, changes both of those problems,” AINews wrote. While earlier trialled at the 2024 FIFA Club World Cup last year, the updated version for 2026 will be tested for how audience react to it, given referrals continue to draw ire.
Story continues below this ad
Another important AI intervention, reported by AINews seems to be the AI-enabled 3D player avatar system, to deal with football’s permanent pimple – offside.
The tech currently is semi-automated. “The existing system works, but the imagery it produces to explain offside decisions has not always been convincing. The lines are hard to read, the angles are counterintuitive, and fans routinely dispute calls that the technology correctly identified. The new system scans players to create precise 3D models, with each scan taking approximately one second. During matches, those models are used to track players more accurately through fast or obstructed movements,” AINews said.
How it works is when an offside decision is referred to VAR, the 3D model produces imagery that is both more accurate and easier to understand, AINews claims. It was tested at the FIFA Intercontinental Cup last year, where Flamengo and Pyramids FC players were scanned ahead of their match.
“The underlying logic is the same as the referee camera: better data, communicated more clearly, reduces the legitimacy gap between the decision and the audience’s acceptance of it,” AINews said.
Story continues below this ad
FIFA, their chief business officer Romy Gai said was building an intelligent command centre that connects real-time data across departments, matches, venues and broadcasters in a single operational view. “The command centre is effectively the enterprise AI backbone behind the public-facing Football AI announcements,” AINews said.
These decisions also strip the local organising committees in USA, Canada and Mexico of a whole lot of responsibility, notably AINews wrote.
