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.