The FIFA World Cup 2026™ will be the biggest in the tournament’s history, spanning 16 host cities, 48 national teams, and billions of fans around the world.
For most people, the magic of football happens on the pitch. But behind every match is an enormous operational effort that must happen flawlessly, from helping referees make split-second decisions to managing venue operations and delivering immersive experiences for fans. That’s where technology comes in.
Through our partnership with FIFA, Lenovo is helping power the infrastructure, intelligence, and AI solutions that support every aspect of the tournament. The goal isn’t technology for technology’s sake. It’s to help make the FIFA World Cup faster, fairer, safer, and more engaging for everyone involved.
Here are four ways AI and technology are helping transform the FIFA World Cup 2026.
Helping every team unlock deeper insights
Every football match generates thousands of data points. Player movements, ball tracking, team formations, tactical adjustments, historical performance patterns, and match statistics all contribute to a growing volume of information.
Historically, turning that information into useful insight required significant time and resources. FIFA AI Pro changes that.
By combining generative AI with football-specific intelligence, FIFA AI Pro allows coaches, analysts, and technical teams to explore complex match data in seconds.
For example, teams can recreate a recent match in a detailed 3D environment and analyze key moments from virtually any perspective. Coaches can examine player positioning, identify tactical weaknesses, evaluate opposing strategies, and better understand how specific decisions influenced the outcome of a game. Teams can also generate visualizations such as shot maps to identify patterns and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Perhaps most importantly, these capabilities are available to all 48 teams competing in the tournament. Advanced football analytics are no longer limited to the largest federations with the biggest budgets. FIFA AI Pro helps democratize access to insights and makes them available in the language of every participating team.
Improving how the world’s biggest sporting event operates
Running a World Cup involves far more than what happens during the 90 minutes of a match.
Across 16 venues and millions of attendees, organizers must coordinate security, transportation, ticketing, retail operations, venue management, communications, and countless other moving parts.
The challenge is not a lack of information. It’s bringing information together in a way that enables faster and better decisions.
That’s the role of the Intelligent Command Center. The platform provides tournament organizers with a unified, real-time operational view across venues and systems. Data from security operations, ticketing platforms, e-commerce systems, venue infrastructure, and live camera feeds can be monitored through a single interface.
AI helps identify emerging issues more quickly, improve coordination among teams, and provide earlier visibility into potential risks before they escalate.
The result is a smoother experience for fans, more efficient operations for organizers, and a safer environment for everyone participating in the tournament.
Supporting match officials with richer visual context
Football’s biggest moments often require officials to evaluate complex situations in real time. Technology can help provide additional visual context during review processes while improving transparency for players, teams, and fans.
To support FIFA’s semi-automated offside technology, Lenovo is helping create personalized AI-powered digital avatars for every player participating in the tournament.
Each of the more than 1,200 players competing in the FIFA World Cup 2026 will have an individually scanned digital twin. Rather than relying on generic player models, officials and fans will see highly detailed representations of the actual players involved in a play.
Our teams can complete player scans in just seconds, while advanced AI technologies create hyper-realistic avatars within hours.
The benefit goes beyond technology. These digital avatars provide richer visual representations during review processes while giving fans a clearer understanding of how decisions are evaluated.
When offside reviews are shown during broadcasts, viewers will see highly detailed representations of the players involved, helping make complex review processes easier to follow and understand. By bringing greater transparency to how reviews are presented, the technology helps create a more engaging experience for fans while supporting tournament operations behind the scenes.
Bringing fans closer to the action
One of the most exciting innovations for fans is the evolution of Referee View technology.
The concept is simple: give audiences a chance to see the game from the referee’s perspective.
The challenge is that referees rarely stand still. Sprinting, turning, stopping, and changing direction create highly unstable footage that can be difficult to watch during a live broadcast.
To solve this challenge, Lenovo developed the Referee View AI Stabilizer, a custom AI-powered synchronization and stabilization engine that corrects motion in real time.
The result is a 50% reduction in visual jitter, creating a dramatically smoother viewing experience.
For fans, it provides a more immersive perspective of the match and a better understanding of what referees are seeing in critical moments. It brings audiences closer to the action while adding a new dimension to the broadcast experience.
Turning data into intelligence
Every match in the FIFA World Cup generates more than 2,000 performance metrics. Even the ball itself produces valuable telemetry data, including position, speed, movement, and force.
The challenge is not collecting information. It’s transforming that information into actionable intelligence in real time.
As the tournament progresses, AI systems will continue learning from every match, enriching the data available to coaches, analysts, officials, and organizers. Each game helps improve the insights available for the next.
Delivering those experiences requires computing power across devices, venues, edge environments, and data centers working together seamlessly. That’s where Lenovo’s Hybrid AI approach plays an important role, helping ensure that insights are available wherever and whenever they are needed.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 will be the largest and most connected tournament in football history.
Our goal is simple: use technology to help make the game fairer for players, smarter for coaches, easier to operate for organizers, and more immersive for billions of fans around the world.
Explore more of the FIFA and Lenovo partnership and join us for the biggest sporting event in the world.