As a FIFA Men’s World Cup consumer (and a still heartbroken USMNT fan), Lenovo’s impact on viewing is quite noticeable. FIFA’s official technology partner has stretched across so many aspects of the game, which we’ve covered previously.
But the feature that’s become a surprise star around this three-country football fiesta is the Referee View. It’s been an enjoyable progression for Tolga Kurtoglu, Lenovo’s chief technology officer, to watch the tech take over the replay experience served to viewers.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but it was more sparingly used at the very beginning in the opening game,” Kurtoglu said. “And then we’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback about the AI cam — the referee cam — and the replays and the fan enthusiasm around that.”
Making it possible is the use of AI to stabilize the view, which was a necessity to secure usable footage. As you can imagine, the raw version of the view is all over the place and choppy because the official is running and moving their head around to keep up with the action and track the ball.
And frankly, it does enhance the view: When Lionel Messi scored against Cabo Verde last week, a flick over the keeper, I found that the Referee View made me relish the quality of the goal even more.
Referee View is the culmination of multiple years’ worth of work. Lenovo and FIFA announced their deal in October 2024, and ideation started immediately after, Kurtoglu said. The ref cam, as my SBJ Tech colleague Joe Lemire wrote last year, was tested during last summer’s Club World Cup, along with the advanced semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) and other key products starring now.
Kurtoglu said the growth of Referee View has come from agile deployment, where feedback is immediately pivoted into enhancements as the tech continues to grow and refine. And along with the entertainment value, Referee View has become an integrity boost around the game as well, Kurtoglu added.
“It’s actually access, transparency, trust and giving the fans an opportunity to see almost exactly the way that the referee views,” Kurtoglu said. “[It] speaks to the transparency and the trust-building of the technology.”
Nailing the messaging
Jeff Shafer can trace Lenovo’s World Cup aspiration to a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.
The company’s chief commercial officer remembers sitting at a table with Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang, CFO Winston Cheng and VP/Global Corporate Communications Charlotte West over three years ago after an earnings call. The conversation shifted to the massive sporting events on the horizon for the U.S. (the 2026 World Cup, LA28, etc.).
“I share that with you because a lot of people think that these things come from these big proactive pitches that came from them to us, or a lengthy and expensive study about what are the properties that are out there,” Shafer told me on a call from the airport last week, “Sure, we did our due diligence, but this started with the vision of our CEO saying, ‘It’s time for Lenovo to become a different kind of company, that it is time for us to elevate our presence, to elevate our brand.’”
Fast forward to the last few weeks, and Lenovo’s core message to World Cup viewers — put simply by me here as “hey, we do a lot more than ThinkPads, folks!” — has been as steady as the drumbeat of Norway’s victory celebrations.
The ribbonboards around the field have continuously flashed the awareness branding in between the tech giant’s wordmark: Smarter AI For All. AI Solution. AI Services. AI PCs. AI Servers.
Lenovo’s deal with FIFA stands alongside its other sizeable sports relationship with Formula 1, for which it also serves as the official technology provider. Sports, along with manufacturing and retail, are the three significant pillars of the company’s future, Shafer added. It now has connections to the world’s most popular sport in soccer and what he called the world’s most technologically advanced sport in F1. And the capabilities it’s showing off now will continue to grow across sports based on the reaction it’s seeing to the World Cup deployments.
“We’ve gotten obviously a lot of outreach ... from other sports teams, entities, leagues, etc., who see that we are able to bring technology to the fore in a way that seems to be making sense to the organizations involved to the broadcasters evolved and to the fans,” Shafer said. “So we definitely see a lot of appetite for what we’re doing.”
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