WHILE the official World Cup matches continue to captivate audiences, public attention is often drawn to the lighter and more humorous moments surrounding the tournament.
In Mexico, during an intense match involving Brazil and Morocco, stadium cameras focused on a young man who appeared far more interested in admiring the cleavage of the woman seated beside him than in the action on the pitch. Realising that his wandering gaze had been broadcast on the giant screen for thousands to see, he quickly pretended to be concentrating on the game. The incident rapidly went viral across social media platforms.
Another widely shared image showed a mother watching the football festivities in a public viewing area while holding her baby. Observant viewers quickly noticed an amusing detail: the baby’s feeding bottle had somehow been misplaced, with the teat resting in the infant’s ear rather than in its mouth. As with many such moments, the photograph generated laughter, memes and countless online comments, illustrating how the World Cup produces memorable stories both on and off the pitch.
For years, football’s most controversial moments have unfolded slowly, whether it is a referee hesitating to raise the flag, replays being examined from different angles, or spectators reacting to choices whose reasoning was not immediately clear.
At the 2026 FIFA World Cup, spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico, those arguments are increasingly being handed over to machines. Not entirely, and not without controversy, but unmistakably.
Somewhere behind every match, tracking limbs, analysing data and filtering content, a battery of artificial intelligence systems is quietly shaping what counts as a goal, how teams prepare to stop one, who sees what afterward, and even what the world is allowed to say about it.
It does not wear a jersey or lift a trophy. Yet this tournament has an invisible teammate, and it is worth understanding what it actually does, and what it does not.
The most visible change is in officiating. Semi-automated offside technology, first introduced at the 2022 World Cup, has become significantly more sophisticated. The latest version can identify offside situations with far greater precision and deliver alerts to assistant referees almost instantly.
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The technology is powered by a combination of high-speed cameras, artificial intelligence models and sensor-equipped match balls. Before the tournament, players were digitally scanned to create highly accurate three-dimensional representations of their bodies. Combined with data captured from multiple cameras tracking key points on each player and sensors inside the ball, the system can reconstruct contested moments with extraordinary accuracy.
For fans, this means fewer prolonged delays and fewer disputes over marginal decisions. For referees, it means assistance from a system capable of processing information far faster than any human official.
FIFA has been careful to present the technology as an aid rather than a replacement. The system can determine positions and timings, but it cannot decide whether a player was interfering with play or gaining an unfair advantage. Human judgment still matters.
Yet this is where accountability becomes more complicated. When a goal is disallowed after an AI-assisted review, who ultimately owns the decision? The referee remains the public face of the call, but much of the underlying analysis may have been performed by a complex chain of software, sensors and algorithms. Football has spent decades scrutinising referees. An AI-assisted referee raises similar questions without offering such a clear target for criticism.
Officiating may grab the headlines, but it is not where most of this tournament’s AI actually operates.
Modern football generates vast quantities of information. Every sprint, tackle, pass and movement can be measured and analysed. Historically, extracting value from that information required large teams of analysts and significant financial resources, giving wealthier football nations a clear advantage. This World Cup is attempting to narrow that gap.
Through Football AI Pro, developed with technology partner Lenovo, all 48 participating teams have access to advanced analytical capabilities. Coaches and analysts can query the system using natural language, examine tactical patterns, study opponents and generate insights that previously required extensive specialist support.
A smaller football nation can now access tools that were once available only to elite programmes with deep pockets. In theory, this makes the tournament more competitive and helps level the playing field.
The same data infrastructure is also helping teams protect their most valuable asset — their players. AI systems increasingly monitor training loads, fatigue indicators and performance patterns to identify elevated injury risks before they become serious problems. It may not generate dramatic headlines, but keeping a key player healthy throughout a month-long tournament can influence results as much as any tactical innovation.
In both cases, the technology does not make decisions. Coaches still choose formations, substitutions and game plans. The algorithms simply provide more information on which those decisions can be based.
Whether that reduces the romance of football intuition or enhances competitive fairness remains open to debate.
Perhaps the least visible, and arguably the most consequential, use of AI at this World Cup lies away from the pitch.
FIFA is once again deploying AI-driven systems designed to protect players, officials and teams from online abuse. These tools scan thousands of keywords and patterns across major social media platforms, identifying potentially abusive, racist or discriminatory content and suppressing it before it reaches its intended targets.
Given the volume of abuse directed at players during previous tournaments, the benefits are obvious. Human moderators alone cannot keep pace with millions of posts generated during a global sporting event.
Security operations are also increasingly supported by AI. Crowd-monitoring systems can identify unusual behaviour patterns, while advanced surveillance technologies help security personnel manage large gatherings more effectively. These developments therefore raise questions that extend beyond football.
Any system trained to identify abuse must draw a line between legitimate criticism and unacceptable behaviour. That distinction is ultimately a matter of judgment. The criteria used by commercial AI systems are often invisible to the public, even when those systems influence what people can see, say or share.
The protection offered is real. So is the possibility that football is becoming a testing ground for forms of automated content governance that may later appear in other areas of public life.
Human and machine, not vs machine
Despite the growing presence of AI, football remains wonderfully resistant to complete optimisation.
A moment of brilliance, a defensive lapse or a fortunate bounce can still overturn the most sophisticated data-driven strategy. The lesson of this tournament is not that machines have replaced human judgment. Rather, human judgment is increasingly being exercised alongside systems capable of seeing, measuring and analysing things beyond human capability.
Most fans will never use semi-automated offside technology. Yet many already interact with similar systems every day. Artificial intelligence helps banks detect fraud, assists doctors in diagnosing illnesses, predicts traffic congestion, recommends entertainment choices and filters spam from email inboxes.
The World Cup simply makes these invisible systems visible.
Football becomes a giant public demonstration of a question societies everywhere are beginning to confront: when should humans trust a machine’s recommendation, and when should they insist on making the final decision themselves?
For countries such as Zimbabwe, there is another lesson worth noting. The most encouraging aspect of these technologies is not their sophistication but their accessibility.
When advanced tools become available to smaller organisations and less wealthy nations, they can narrow gaps that were previously reinforced by resources alone.
Talent has never been evenly distributed. Increasingly, neither is technology. Where those tools are available, and who gets access to them, may prove as important as the tools themselves.
What football has not yet fully resolved, and what this World Cup is forcing into the open, is how to apply meaningful scrutiny to algorithms.
The sport has learned to ask hard questions about doping, match-fixing, governance and financial fair play. An AI-powered World Cup deserves equally rigorous questions about transparency, bias, accountability and oversight.
Algorithms are not automatically neutral. They reflect the data on which they are trained, the assumptions built into their design and the priorities of the organisations that deploy them. They become trustworthy only when someone is willing to examine them critically.
When the final whistle blows and a champion lifts the trophy, the celebration will belong, entirely and rightly, to the players.
But somewhere in the background, in an earpiece, a tactical report, a security system or a hidden comment, the algorithms will have played their part as well.
The most important question may not be whether artificial intelligence belongs in football.
It may be whether anyone is watching the watchers.
Bangure is a technology analyst based in the UK, where he examines the impact of emerging technologies on economies and societies. With extensive experience as a newspaper production manager and media executive, coupled with formal training in data analytics and artificial intelligence, he effectively integrates technological expertise with strategic insight. — [email protected].
