SBJ Tech: Lenovo starring in World Cup formation

To my Chicago friends: I’ll be visiting your city at the start of next week for SBJ’s Brand Innovation Summit. I’ll have some pockets of time in between moderator duties — I have three panels, with one featuring a look at AWS’s sports sponsorships and how its transformed those relationships — to get around the Miracle Mile for some meetups. Please reach out if you’ll be around!

We’ve got a really fun newsletter this week, looking at some of Lenovo’s innovations around the upcoming FIFA Men’s World Cup and also another new product from WMT Digital. Let’s dive in.

P.S. There’s plenty of room on the bandwagon to cheer along with me as my Carolina Hurricanes fight for the Stanley Cup (I’m still emotionally eating after that Game 1 loss, thank you very much). Feel free to hop on!

This upcoming FIFA World Cup has been described as many things:

• The most sprawling because of its three-country setting.
• The biggest because it’s the first featuring 48 national teams.
• The most expensive, which is individually subjective but also quite documented at this point.

And this week, the governing body provided the clearest look at how Lenovo, FIFA’s official technology sponsor, will help this be the most innovation-infused World Cup yet.

FIFA Director of Innovation Johannes Holzmüller and Lenovo SVP/CIO Art Hu sprinted through the tech gauntlet this week during a chat with a select group of international journalists, covering the analysis tool Football AI Pro, three-dimensional scans of players, officiating boosts and more.

Here’s what intrigued me most from their wide-ranging breakdown:

Football AI Pro’s benefits to football staffs

Holzmüller shared that FIFA has often given teams massive mounds of post-match information in previous World Cups, but frankly, it was a tedious endeavor for coaches and analysts. “In the past, what happened was that after each match, we have been providing teams with a lot of data,” Holzmüller said. “It was a very long report ... I think 50-60 page reports.”

Football AI Pro changes that, giving analysts a generative AI platform to lean on for game breakdowns and opponent preparations. All World Cup competitors can engage the tool using natural language (no prompt training needed!) and ask “give me the positional breakdown for the USMNT’s Weston McKennie and where he’s been most effective.” If you’re a soccer fan, you know McKennie appears all over the field for both club and country.

Football AI Pro also points to various forms of supporting evidence for its answers and let users drop into a 3D version of a play and view the on-field progression through a player’s perspective.

“We’re able to make that much more natural language [with Football AI Pro], and we’re able to have 3D visualizations in terms of what is possible to answer deep football questions around analytics, match tactics, max strategies and player analytics that you cannot get from any consumer tool,” Hu explained.

The automation boost to referees

While semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) first appeared at the 2022 tournament in Qatar, an advanced version will debut at this World Cup. Perhaps most significantly, clear offside calls will be communicated directly with the assistant referees on the sideline, allowing them to quickly raise a flag instead of bogging down play.

This new version of SAOT still faces some limitations when dealing with clusters of players (referred to as occlusion) or individuals lying on the ground, Holzmüller admitted, but this is an effort to make sure that technology is additive to the flow of play and a running clock. Holzmüller said that over three years of testing at other FIFA tournaments, SAOT can now measure a player offside by as little as 10 centimeters (roughly four inches).

“The final call is still the assistant referee’s,” Holzmüller said. “It’s just a supportive tool where, for clear offsides, when the system is very confident that it’s offsides, then this information is directly sent.”

Data, data and more data

The sheer size of the data infrastructure is pretty eye-opening. All 16 World Cup venues will be equipped with 16 optical tracking cameras, which will measure 29 data points over 50 times per second of play. I tried to come up with a comparison here to help you digest the magnitude, but I hurt my brain and stopped.

The ball has sensors that convey the movement data. All players undergo a 3D scan during their media days, which plays into the visualization efforts of broadcasters (a faceless avatar is now replaced by a digital replica of Lionel Messi) and of officiating, which will see its offside calling capabilities boosted by exact player dimensions.

I see these innovations as setups for really compelling enhancements for future games, and I couldn’t help but imagine a day when we get a tabletop breakdown of games with player avatars, similar to NBC’s AR Sandbox used for NBA broadcasts.

Soccer fans (yours truly included) would eat that up.

For Andres Focil, there’s always a bigger picture. The CEO and founder of WMT Digital started his firm as a new-age marketing platform in the early days of SEO. Since then, the company has produced a suite of products that touch many facets of sports, like platform building, engagement and ticketing. WMT works with nearly 300 sports and entertainment brands, along with 100-plus college athletics departments.

The latest step in the bigger picture is WMT Fan Intelligence, a customer data platform specifically made for sports. The goal is to provide better profiling of fans, accounting for their ticketing and merchandise purchases, and, ultimately, providing a deeper understanding of overall and real-time sentiment to inform action.

“We’ve been thinking about this for many, many years now,” said Focil, an SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree in 2025. “Sports organizations have invested heavily in collecting fan data, but they don’t really have answers to the most pertinent questions, most important questions around their data, which is who are their fans and what do they care about?”

Focil said this fan intelligence platform can connect to any dataset hub necessary. And that connection will let users ask questions of their own data via natural language processing — like prompting the system to pull a list of single-game buyers who have invested significantly in merch so they can be cultivated into partial or full-season ticket holders. WMT Fan Intelligence is being used by a select few clients — BYU has deployed it, while San Diego State and Texas A&M are still onboarding — and will roll out at a wider scale in Q3.

Focil is excited to take on early feedback from them, especially when it comes to seeing how they help train the AI-infused tool for their respective fans and the college user base for WMT as a whole.

“You can create and deliver audiences that are personalized for them, and it just becomes very automated from that perspective,” Focil said. “That’s where it gets smarter.

“That feedback — when it gets smarter, when they start asking it more questions, as they start asking 600 more questions — is going to become really powerful.”

• My SBJ Tech colleague Joe Lemire highlights a ticketing experiment Belgian Grand Prix underwent to sell F1 tickets with a Napster AI tool.
• Game1, a predictive AI platform for developing and scouting youth soccer players, is expanding its product from Europe to the U.S., Lemire also reports.
• SailGP, an SBJ 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Company, staged its fourth event in New York last weekend, with my SBJ colleague Rob Schaefer writing on the latest premium offering and yet another future expansion for the league.
• Lemire also highlights a new development from Fox Sports called BRISK (Broadcast Remote IP Studio Kit), a portable set of six small server racks that will help the network cover the most sprawling FIFA World Cup yet.
• Schaefer also notes Fox One, the network’s flagship streaming service that launched last August, is preparing for its largest product moment to date with the upcoming World Cup.
• WePlayed Sports, an AI-powered clipping tool that helps university athletic departments produce social media-ready video content, rolled out a new offering earlier this month called Own the Moment.
• The PGA Tour is the latest property to partner with Recast, a fintech solution for global streaming distribution, to broaden its reach into regions where it doesn’t have rights deals.