The FIFA World Cup starts soon. For the first time, each team will have an AI coach.
FIFA via Getty Images
When Mexico kicks off against South Africa at Estadio Azteca on June 11, the 2026 World Cup will be the biggest in the tournament’s history: 48 teams, 104 matches, three countries. It will also be the first World Cup where every single team walks in with the same AI analyst sitting on the bench.
Or maybe not exactly sitting. And not quite on the bench, either. Think of FIFA AI Pro more as a coach in the cloud, perhaps. With, of course, a perfect photographic memory of thousands of soccer games.
Essentially, it’s ChatGPT for football (or soccer, depending on where you live). Co-developed by FIFA and tournament sponsor Lenovo and unveiled in January at CES, FIFA AI Pro is an AI assistant that lets all 48 World Cup teams query FIFA’s exclusive match data — millions of data points across 2,000+ metrics — and get tactical insights back as video, animated replays, and 3D avatars.
Teams can ask FIFA AI Pro almost any kind of match-related question:
- How am I failing on offense?
- What setup leads to better outcomes against this opponent?
- Which players have historically defended best against Messi?
- What’s the best way to break through France’s defense?
- Which midfielders give my strikers the best balls?
How FIFA AI Pro actually works
Under the hood, Lenovo says it has analyzed more than 2,000 distinct metrics from thousands of games. In other words, this isn’t a generic LLM model that has been adapted for soccer. It uses FIFA’s own tracking data, player telemetry, and historical tactical analysis — every camera angle and body sensor from every match — plugged directly into the back end.
“You can actually go ask ChatGPT who’s going to win the match,” one Lenovo executive told me. “But it doesn’t have the data set.”
Only FIFA has all the data, making FIFA AI Pro potentially much smarter about its answers and recommendations.
Analysts can compare team patterns using video and 3D avatars. Coaches can get a tactical sandbox: a place to test how a formation change might play out against their next opponent before trying it IRL. Players can get personalized analysis of their own game.
According to FIFA, it keeps learning during the tournament. New match data will flow into the AI engine within two to three hours of the final whistle, so by the round of 16, FIFA AI Pro will be smarter than it is now. (And, of course, more up-to-date as teams try new tactics and see success or failure with them during the tournament.)
This helps smaller teams more than bigger teams
The big teams, the ones who are favorites to win or at least go far already employ rooms full of analysts, assistant coaches and maybe even data scientists.
For them, FIFA AI Pro is probably a nice-to-have. It’s unlikely to be a revelation.
But at the other end of the spectrum, this year’s field includes Curaçao and Cabo Verde, two of the smallest nations ever to reach a World Cup. Teams like that probably don’t have the budget to staff an analytics department. For them, an AI tool like this isn’t a marginal upgrade. It’s kind of the entire department, handed over for free.
Of course, this is the first year FIFA will be using this kind of technology. So we’ll have to see if it really helps – does Moneyball work in football – or if good old fashioned soccer sense from coaches with decades of experience will still have an edge.
At least theoretically now, however, FIFA AI pro will raises the floor and compress the analytics gap between the richest federations and the poorest ones. That’s a genuinely interesting factor to watch for: will we see more upsets this year than usual, or more exotic defensive or offensive schemes?
Of course, everyone has it. And when every team gets the same tool, the tool itself stops being an advantage … if they all use it. In that scenario, the edge moves to who interprets it best and who actually acts on what it says, so there’s still a human coach making a human call. Also, another caveat: note the two-to-three-hour turnaround in processing match data. This is a preparation tool, not an in-match strategy engine. So humans are still in charge.
My big question: will fans — and kids — ever get it?
This is the question I kept circling back to, when chatting with Lenovo and FIFA executives.
At CES, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said the tool would reach “fans as well.” When I asked executives directly, the answer was a bit more guarded: nothing has been finalized.
“We’ll take it under advisement,” Lenovo CMO Milo Speranzo told me while emphasizing that this is still brand new. “Fans would go nuts over something like this, right? Fans would love to do something like this … couch coach … we do it all the time anyways, right?”
However, it’s probably just a matter of time. And, I guess money. The desire, at least, is there.
“Are any of the new technologies employed at FIFA going to trickle down to consumer products?” Speranzo said “As a technologist, the answer has to be yes, right?”
If and how that works out, he added, will be largely up to FIFA.
Lenovo points to AI-powered cameras already letting a single inexpensive setup capture and analyze a youth match … the kind of analytics that used to require a stadium’s worth of Hawkeye rigs. Stretch that out a few years and the same intelligence FIFA is handing its 48 national teams could plausibly reach a third-division side in the Netherlands, or a U12 squad in Ohio whose parent just wants to watch a game (and maybe second-guess the coach) while away on business.
For now, FIFA AI Pro belongs to 48 teams and a handful of FIFA analysts.
Impact on the games? Uncertain
It’s not clear how much this new tool will impact games. Both FIFA and Lenovo executives are quick to point out that this is still a human sport with human decisions and human successes or failures. That’s literally why we want people in the World Cup, and not robots.
But this will shape training sessions, set-piece planning, and how a coach approaches the next opponent. And because the dataset grows as the tournament progresses, the tactical reads should get sharper deep into the knockout rounds, right when margins are thinnest.
But the tool only matters if a coach acts on it – and if it’s correct, of course — so any edge FIFA AI Pro offers will still be fully dependent on human decisions. As it should be, I guess.
