LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyAt the 2026 World Cup, the refs on the field and the officials on the sidelines will be able to use an abundance of tech to help call penalties, spot offside violations, and make other consequential decisions.
The video assistant referee system, known as VAR, and the semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) have been used in soccer for years. But the setup at this summer's World Cup represents some of the most advanced uses of adjudication tech to date—not just in soccer, but across all high-level sports.
During each match, the pitch will be awash in sensors, cameras, and new computer vision software. One especially notable advancement this year is the use of digital twins. Every player in the World Cup has had their body scanned by a computer. The digital twin of any athlete—which precisely matches their height, limb length, and shoe size—can be dropped into a virtual simulation of the game to determine their exact position relative to the ball, boundary lines, and other players. Officials can use all of this data to help spot infractions, determine penalties, and smooth out the edges of the beautiful game.
Even though these systems can study the action more closely than is possible with the human eye, flesh-and-blood refs are still part of the game. But when the referees get it wrong—which they do, ask any fan—and their decisions are challenged, officials can to turn to the technology to correct any mistakes, replacing subjective calls with objective truths.
These systems are primarily used to catch big errors, like checking to see if a particular player was offside during a play that resulted in a game-deciding goal. But teams can often call for a review of even inconsequential plays. It raises the question of where the system's value lies: in bringing an impartial eye to pivotal moments, or in allowing the league to adjudicate tiny infractions of an inch here or an inch there.
FIFA and other worldwide soccer agencies have made their position on the subject clear: They want the big errors gone, sure, but those inches also matter a lot.
Elements of this year’s setup are similar to the 2022 World Cup, but with upgrades. Hawk-Eye remains the event’s optical tracking provider, with its computer vision system capturing over two dozen skeletal points on each player at all times. The tracking system uses 16 high-resolution cameras this time around compared to 12 in 2022, FIFA director of innovation Johannes Holzmüller says.
And like in 2022, that optical data will be combined with advanced sensors inside the ball itself. Kinexon, a leader in the sports wearables space, will again be providing the match ball’s digital brain. This time it will include an ultrawide-band and IMU sensor setup (including both an accelerometer and gyroscope, the latter of which is vital for capturing ball spin) that tracks the ball’s precise location and any distinct touches, recording those data points 500 times per second.
The 2022 version of the ball sensor sat suspended in the center of the ball’s interior, supported by a string-based sling made by Adidas, which also makes the ball itself. This time, though, Adidas has created a small bladder to hold the sensor that’s placed along the inside wall of the ball.
“It’s vulcanized inside the bladder with a little plastic pouch,” says Maximillian Schmidt, Kinexon’s cofounder and managing director. “That vulcanization is just way more stable than those strings, which had hooks that could break easier.”
Placing the sensor along the ball’s interior wall instead of the center, however, requires some counterbalancing so the added weight on one side of the ball doesn’t make it wobble. While Schmidt says the entire setup weighs just 13 grams, his team had to calibrate everything to ensure every touch or movement of the ball is tracked evenly. And because the sensor now sits right at a point where it could be kicked directly, more robust impact testing was a key part of the process.
Combined, these optical and in-ball tracking systems will capture every nuance of all 104 World Cup games. But it’s the high-tech assist borrowed from the world of virtual reality that will make them, somehow, even more accurate.
During the lead-up to the tournament, all 2026 World Cup players have undergone a 360-degree high-resolution scan from FIFA’s tech partner, Lenovo. These scans will be ingested into the Hawk-Eye system, where they will replace generic avatars that have previously been used for offside and other VAR applications.
Courtesy of LenovoArt Hu, Lenovo’s global chief innovation officer, says these scans will define the body’s shape, muscle tone, and even shoe size with an accuracy of 1 to 2 millimeters. “That’s an order of magnitude improvement on an ordinary avatar,” Hu says.
Hu notes that this sort of full-body scanning itself isn’t especially novel, with a number of such scanners used across different sectors. The real technical challenge here is using a single scan of a player, taken while they’re standing still, and applying that digital twin to Hawk-Eye’s skeletal pose data in active gameplay scenarios—when the players are running, jumping, or sliding. The cost of these few extra inches of precision is an enormous amount of computing power and algorithmic tuning.
FIFA tested the new setup at the Club World Cup and Intercontinental Cup in 2025, plus at various youth tournaments over the last 18 months, Holzmüller tells me.
Prior versions of this digital twin tech had already been used to assist in VAR decisions for the lead-up to all goals and penalty kicks. The new one will also help review red-card penalties and incidents where an on-field official accidentally penalizes the wrong player. The VAR technicians will have the ability to overturn corner kick decisions if the system is able to detect the error and then alert the refs on the field through their headset without delaying the game. (Some calls take longer to calculate and would slow down the game as a result, and therefore VAR won’t be used for those.)
In another effort to reduce wasted time from reviews, VAR will now send immediate alerts to sideline officials for obvious, promptly detectable offside decisions, stopping play right away. This differs from past arrangements that allowed play to continue after the violation, only stopping the action later if a notable event like a goal or a penalty took place.
Holzmüller says his team is confident that the upgrades to the VAR system’s accuracy will allow for the correct call to be made more often, even on especially nuanced decisions, like “when there’s only one toe offside.”
While the vast majority of offside plays can be spotted by watching slowed-down broadcast footage in video replays, a handful of infractions (or non-infractions) occur at the precise moment between video frames. Despite the rarity of this problem, FIFA is dead set on solving it: Holzmüller says a combination of the 3D scans and ball-tracking data—which by capturing positions 500 times per second can produce higher-resolution data than video’s 60 frames per second—will supplement the video footage to provide the most complete picture possible.
Maybe the most interesting feature of the digital twin tech is a “3D goalkeeper view” within VAR. This visualizer can show the goalie’s point of view and, using the system’s digital inputs, determine if an attacking player in an offside position interfered with the keeper. This interference has long been illegal in soccer, but the number of players and size of the field have made it hard to call accurately.
Hu points out the wide array of possible uses for digital twin technologies across sports, from officiating applications like these to athlete health and performance. As models become more powerful and computing costs drop, they’ll only improve.
It’s fair to wonder if the juice is truly worth the squeeze for gaining an inch or two of resolution on certain rare calls. Holzmüller readily admits these advances, and all the technical and financial legwork that comes with them, might only change a few calls throughout the entire tournament. From FIFA’s perspective, though, there’s no question of its value when it comes to arguably the world’s biggest sporting event.
“We have to bring the best technology to the World Cup,” he says. “That’s our goal.”
Michael Calore contributed reporting to this story.
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