This World Cup, Officials Will Use Digital Replicas of Each Player to Examine Plays From All Angles
At the 2026 World Cup, on-field referees and sideline officials will have access to an array of technology to assist in calling penalties, detecting offside infractions, and making other critical judgments.
The video assistant referee system, abbreviated as VAR, and semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) have been a part of soccer for years. However, the configuration at this year’s World Cup marks some of the most sophisticated implementations of adjudication technology to date—not just in soccer, but across all elite sports.
During every match, the field will be flooded with sensors, cameras, and new computer vision software. A particularly significant advancement this year is the deployment of digital twins. Every athlete in the World Cup has undergone a computerized body scan. The digital twin of any player—which precisely mirrors their height, limb length, and shoe size—can be inserted into a virtual simulation of the match to ascertain their precise location relative to the ball, boundary lines, and other competitors. Officials can leverage all this data to help identify infractions, determine penalties, and refine the nuances of the beautiful game.
Although these systems can scrutinize the action more closely than the human eye allows, flesh-and-blood referees remain part of the game. But when referees make mistakes—which they do, as any fan will attest—and their decisions are contested, officials can turn to the technology to rectify errors, replacing subjective calls with objective facts.
These systems are mainly employed to catch major errors, such as verifying whether a specific player was offside during a play that led to a game-winning goal. Yet teams can often request a review of even minor plays. This raises the question of where the system’s true value lies: in delivering an impartial perspective on pivotal moments, or in enabling the league to adjudicate tiny infractions measured in inches here and there.
FIFA and other global soccer organizations have clarified their stance: they want to eliminate major errors, certainly, but those inches also carry significant weight.
**The eyes have it**
Components of this year’s setup resemble those of the 2022 World Cup, but with enhancements. Hawk-Eye remains the event’s optical tracking provider, using its computer vision system to capture over two dozen skeletal points on each player at all times. The tracking system now employs 16 high-resolution cameras, compared to 12 in 2022, according to FIFA director of innovation Johannes Holzmüller.
And as in 2022, that optical data will be merged with advanced sensors inside the ball itself. Kinexon, a leader in sports wearables, will again supply the match ball’s digital brain. This iteration includes an ultrawide-band and IMU sensor setup (featuring both an accelerometer and gyroscope, the latter crucial for capturing ball spin) that monitors the ball’s exact location and any distinct touches, recording those data points 500 times per second.
The 2022 version of the ball sensor was suspended in the center of the ball’s interior, supported by a string-based sling made by Adidas, which also manufactures the ball. This time, however, Adidas has developed a small bladder to house the sensor, positioned 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 to prevent the added weight on one side from causing the ball to wobble. While Schmidt notes the entire setup weighs only 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 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 detail of all 104 World Cup matches. But it’s the high-tech assist borrowed from the world of virtual reality that will make them, somehow, even more precise.
**Digital twins**
In 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 integrated into the Hawk-Eye system, where they will replace generic avatars previously used for offside and other VAR applications.
Art 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 type of full-body scanning itself isn’t particularly novel, with numerous such scanners used across different industries. The real technical challenge lies in 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 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, along with various youth tournaments over the last 18 months, Holzmüller tells me.
Earlier versions of this digital twin technology 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. VAR technicians will have the ability to overturn corner kick decisions if the system can detect the error and then alert the referees 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 cut down on 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 occurred.
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.”
**Keeper peeper**
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 determined to solve 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.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the digital twin technology 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 difficult to call accurately.
Hu points out the wide array of potential 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 decrease, they will only improve.
It’s fair to question whether the effort is truly worth the gain for 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 doubt about 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.”
This story originally appeared on wired.com