Slowly but surely, artificial intelligence is finding its way into sports. The latest venue? This year’s World Cup, where Google will be partnering with the defending champions Argentina to showcase Gemini on and off the pitch.
The agreement with the Argentine Football Association (AFA) makes Gemini the main global sponsor of the national team. As part of the collaboration, Google Gemini’s logo will appear on the Albiceleste’s training kit and the AI tool itself will be used to analyze the team’s plays, form, performance, and statistics.
“It’s not just about opening the door [to] AI,” says Google spokesperson Flor Sabatini, “but about understanding its real limits while improving experience.”
During the tournament, players and coaching staff will have access to AI models to break down plays, analyze opponent statistics and, in theory, shorten the time it takes for that analysis to be put into action on the pitch. Google has not detailed exactly what internal tools Argentina will use, but the intention is clear: The World Cup will be a stress test for Google’s AI in the high-pressure environment of professional soccer.
For the fan, the proposition is more tangible and, in some ways, more ambitious. Google’s search engine will be reconfigured to act like a fellow fan, with AI-generated answers for real-time queries, analysis of key plays and in-depth statistics. It will also allow fans to create songs, memes, cartoons, and other visual content to encourage social media interaction during and after each match.
According to Google, the search giant closed its deal with Argentina in March but didn’t announce it until May in order to continue negotiating with other teams. Although Google has put the media focus on Argentina—likely because of the high-profile of players like Lionel Messi—the company has also closed deals with Brazil and France, two other teams that have lifted the World Cup.
Sabatini says that, for Google, the World Cup is the most important cultural event of the year. “The passion that the Argentine national team arouses transcends Argentines. It is a shared emotion,” she stresses. From the AFA’s perspective, the agreement represents an injection of modernity into an institution that, like most teams, navigates between soccer tradition and the urgency of monetizing its brand.
The move has its risks. Bringing AI into World Cup arenas means exposing it to millions of simultaneous queries, diverse cultural contexts, and the inevitable volatility of the outcome of individual matches. If Gemini mixes up a statistic, invents a lineup, or generates an image with a misplaced shield, the error will have a global level of exposure.
World Cups are traditionally culture-shaping events that accelerate the adoption of new technologies, from the popularization of color television to the use of GPS to measure players’ training sessions to the use of video-assistant referee (VAR) technology to resolve disputes over calls on the pitch. Now, it’s AI.
The difference here is scale. Never before has a technology company placed the name of its AI on the chest of players and, at the same time, on the smartphones of millions of fans.
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.