The Smart Game: Football Innovation on the Road to the 2026 Football World Cup
June 30, 2026
As the Football World Cup 2026 is going on, patent analytics reveals how smart balls, semi-automated offside technology and connected data systems are reshaping football, from more precise decisions on the pitch to new ways of experiencing the game.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 is more than a tournament. With 48 teams and 104 matches across Canada, Mexico and the United States, it is also a global technology stage.[1] Football’s worldwide reach gives innovation unusual visibility: FIFA reported that the 2022 World Cup engaged around five billion fans, making it the most followed edition in the tournament’s history.[2]
IP analytics adds another layer to this story. WIPO’s recently published Technology SPARK Report on Sports Technology identified 9,669 football-related patent families published from 2016 to 2025, representing more than 14% of all sports technology inventions in the dataset. More than 450 football-related patent families used WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system, reflecting the international orientation of the field.[3]
Figure 1. Football innovation at-a-glance: patenting activity, leading applicants, inventive locations and technology focus areas, 2016–2025
Figure 1 shows that football innovation is not concentrated in a single area. Performance monitoring, apparel and equipment, fan engagement, footwear, playing-area technologies and referee assistance all appear as active fields. The same figure also shows the strong role of major sports equipment companies and the global distribution of football-related inventive activity.
The patent publication trend rose into the 2018 World Cup period, stayed high through 2019–2023, and increased sharply in 2024 and 2025. This rhythm broadly coincides with major tournament cycles, but it should not be read as simple causality. It also reflects wider advances in sensors, computer vision, wireless communication, artificial intelligence and broadcast infrastructure.
Figure 2. Football patenting among the last five FIFA World Cup champion countries, 2016–2025
Among the last five FIFA World Cup champion countries, Germany stands out clearly in football-related patenting, with 324 published patent families, ahead of Italy, France, Spain and Argentina. This does not imply a direct link between sporting success and patent activity, but it highlights Germany’s strong football technology ecosystem. Germany is also the only World Cup-winning country represented among the top five football inventive locations, through companies such as Adidas and Puma, and football represents the largest share of Germany’s sports technology patents.
Two technology areas are especially relevant for the 2026 World Cup agenda: advanced semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) and connected ball technology.
From offside line to decision-support system
Offside is one of football’s most technically demanding decisions. It depends on player position, ball position, the exact moment the ball is played and whether the attacking player becomes involved in active play. This explains why referee-assisting technologies form a larger and faster-growing patent space than connected ball technology alone.
Figure 3. Patent publication trend for referee-assisting technologies and connected ball technologies, 2016–2025
As shown in Figure 3, semi-automated offside technology and referee-assisting patent publications rise from 121 in 2016 to 435 in 2025, while connected ball patents publications increase from 54 to 127 over the same period. The two technology areas are different in scale but increasingly connected in function. Referee assistance needs reliable information about player position and ball contact; connected balls can provide high-frequency movement data that helps identify the timing of kicks, touches and deflections.
FIFA’s semi-automated offside technology uses dedicated tracking cameras to track the ball and up to 29 data points on each player, 50 times per second. The aim is not to remove the referee, but to accelerate and support the video assistant referee process by generating more consistent positional evidence.[4] FIFA has also been testing advanced SAOT, including systems that provide assistant referees with immediate audio alerts when a positional offside occurs, helping speed up offside decision-making.[5]
The patent record shows that offside has been approached from several directions. EP1944067B1 concerns detecting contact with a ball, including for offside situations, by sensing and processing the sound signal produced when the ball is kicked or touched. WO2006/111928A2 describes real-time or semi-automatic classification of events, particularly offside, using imaging and calculation technologies. US2009/0298588A1 takes a sensor-based approach, using wireless sensors on players and the ball, read by fixed detectors around the field. More recent image-based records, such as WO2020/089711A1, frame the task as near real-time “smart video assistant referee” detection using image sequences.[6]
Together, these records show that offside is not just a line-drawing problem. It is a synchronization problem. The system must identify where the relevant body parts are and when the ball was last played. This is why ball-contact and kick-point detection have become central to referee assistance.
The connected ball as a referee input
Connected ball technology addresses the timing side of this problem. FIFA describes connected ball technology as integrating a small inertial measurement unit sensor into the ball to capture acceleration and three-dimensional movement data 500 times per second. This data can support semi-automated offside systems by helping identify the kick point more precisely.[7]
The Adidas Trionda, the official match ball of the FIFA World Cup 2026, brings together tournament identity, product design and embedded sensing. FIFA describes it as featuring a 500Hz motion sensor chip that sends precise ball-movement data to the video assistant referee system.[8] WIPO’s sports technology report identifies the Trionda as international design DM/241148 under the Hague System, filed in October 2024. The ball uses four thermally bonded polyurethane panels and a visual identity linked to the three host countries, including red, green and blue elements and national symbols.[9]
Representative patent records show how the connected-ball field has developed. US9257054B2, assigned to Adidas AG, describes sport ball monitoring systems in which a sensor module may be attached to, suspended inside, or integrated into layers of a ball. US9849361B2 and CN105080111 concern sport ball motion monitoring, including motion or acceleration data from the ball and the determination of speed, spin, launch angle and point of impact. US12023564B2 adds a data-management layer, with the sport ball sampling motion data, saving it in a buffer and adjusting saving rates when motion variability increases, such as after impact.[10]
For football officiating, these ideas matter because the ball can become a reliable time-stamped signal in the decision chain. When combined with optical player tracking, ball motion data can help identify the kick point, last touch, deflections and potentially handball or double-contact events. This is where connected ball technology and SAOT converge.
From broadcast enhancement to officiating infrastructure
The journey of Hawk-Eye shows how sports technologies often enter through broadcasting before becoming part of officiating. Originally associated with cricket ball tracking, Hawk-Eye used multi-camera video analytics to reconstruct ball trajectory and support decisions such as leg before wicket. The early patent publication GB2357207A, “Ball tracking and trajectory prediction,” by Roke Manor Research Ltd., is a useful historical reference point.[11]
The same broader logic – tracking, reconstructing and explaining high-speed events – later shaped tennis line-calling and football officiating systems. In 2024, FIFA and Hawk-Eye Innovations announced a joint venture to further develop football technologies, including automated event-data collection and automated offside technology.[12] This points to a wider movement from replay toward real-time interpretation.
The 2026 lens
The FIFA World Cup 2026 arrives at a moment when football innovation is moving from isolated tools to integrated decision-support ecosystems. Cameras track players. Sensors track the ball. Algorithms reconstruct events. Broadcast systems translate evidence into graphics. Designs such as the Adidas Trionda ball show that the same object can carry aerodynamic, symbolic, digital and IP value.
For patent analytics, the most important signal is not only the volume of filings, but the convergence of technical fields. Referee assistance, connected balls, player tracking, video analytics and protected product design are increasingly connected. The result is a sport where fairness, performance, broadcasting and fan engagement are shaped by the same underlying innovation race.
How far officiating technology can extend without altering the character and flow of the game remains an active question among football's governing bodies, clubs and fans. Advanced SAOT and connected ball systems offer the potential to make critical decisions faster, clearer and more consistent. They also show how IP increasingly sits at the center of major sporting events: not as a separate legal layer, but as part of how the modern game is designed, played and watched.
Find out more in the WIPO Technology SPARK Report on Sports Technology.