Little by little, artificial intelligence is finding its way into sports. The latest location? This year’s World Cup, where Google will be partnering with defending champions Argentina to showcase Gemini on and off the field.
The agreement with the Argentina Football Association (AFA) makes Gemini the main sponsor of the national team worldwide. As part of the partnership, the Google Gemini logo will appear on the Albiceleste training kit and the AI tool itself will be used to analyze the team’s games, form, performance, and statistics.
“It’s not just about opening the door [to] AI,” said Google spokesperson Flor Sabatini, “but about understanding its true limits while improving experience.”
During the tournament, players and coaches will have access to AI models to break down plays, analyze opponents’ stats and, in theory, shorten the time it takes for that analysis to be applied on the field. Google didn’t specify which internal tools Argentina will use, but the goal is clear: The World Cup will be a stress test for Google’s AI in the high-pressure environment of soccer.
For fans, the proposal is very visible and, in a way, very ambitious. Google’s search engine will be restructured to act as a partner, with AI-generated answers to real-time questions, analysis of key games and in-depth analytics. It will also allow fans to create songs, memes, animations, and other visual content to encourage social media interaction during and after each game.
According to Google, the search giant closed its deal with Argentina in March but had to announce it until May to continue negotiating with other parties. While Google has focused media attention on Argentina—perhaps due to the high profile of players like Lionel Messi—the company has also closed deals with Brazil and France, two other teams that have promoted the World Cup.
Sabatini says that, for Google, the World Cup is the most important cultural event of the year. “The motivation of the Argentine national team goes beyond Argentines. It’s a shared feeling,” he emphasized. From the AFA’s point of view, the deal represents an injection of modernity for the club, which, like many clubs, is navigating between the culture of football and the urgency of monetizing its product.
Movement has its risks. Bringing AI to World Cup stadiums means exposing it to millions of questions at once, different cultural contexts, and the inevitable volatility of the outcome of each game. If a Gemini calculates, invents a plan, or produces a picture with a misplaced shield, the error will have a global level of exposure.
World Cups are traditionally culture-building events that accelerate the adoption of new technologies, from the celebrity adoption of color television to the use of GPS to measure players’ training sessions to the use of assistant referee (VAR) technology to resolve disputes with on-field calls. Now, the AI.
The difference here is scale. Never before has a technology company placed the name of its AI on the chests 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.
