I Grew Up Playing Soccer. Watching AI Light Up This World Cup Is Surreal.

In plain terms: The World Cup is happening right now, it is the biggest one ever, and artificial intelligence is woven through all of it. This is the fun version of an AI story: what happens when the world's most-watched event puts AI right out in the open. There is a real takeaway for business owners at the end, but I will be honest, I mostly just wanted to enjoy this one.

I grew up playing soccer. A lot of my best memories are on a field somewhere, and the World Cup was always the thing you stopped everything to watch. So this post is part business and part me being a fan, because this summer the game I love and the work I do ran straight into each other, and it is a blast to watch.

The most eyes on anything, ever

Start with the scale, because it is hard to believe. This is the first 48-team World Cup, 104 matches across 16 cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, running June 11 to July 19. Demand broke every record on the books. FIFA logged more than 150 million ticket requests in the first 15 days alone, which made the tournament 30 times oversubscribed, and stadiums hit one million fans in the first five days of play.

The viewership is the part that stops me. The last World Cup engaged roughly 5 billion people. This one is projected to be the most-watched event in human history, on the order of 5 billion-plus viewers and an average of about 128 million per day. For comparison, the Super Bowl draws around 125 million in the U.S. in a single day. The World Cup is on track to do that, more or less, every day for over a month.

There has rarely been a moment where this many humans are paying attention to the same thing at the same time. And this is the moment AI decided to show up.

And AI showed up to play

The most fun example is the simplest. OpenAI made Lionel Messi the face of a global ChatGPT campaign and dropped a shareable prompt that recolors your hair in your country's flag colors. Messi did his in Argentina blue and white. In a single week, fans sent more than 17 million World Cup-related questions to ChatGPT, asking for predictions, player stats, schedules, and help planning watch parties.

Here is Messi himself on it:

"I've always loved seeing how people experience football differently in each country. I turned to ChatGPT to imagine myself cheering in a new way, and I started with Argentina's colours, of course. This season, I think many fans will discover new ways to follow the matches, better understand what happens on the field, and show their support with AI."

He is not wrong. Google made its Gemini AI a main sponsor of Argentina's and France's national teams, with staff using it for tactical analysis and injury prevention. The biggest names in AI are not sponsoring the World Cup from the sidelines. They are in the locker room.

Even the ball is smart now

This is the part the soccer kid in me loves most. The official match ball has a sensor in its core that reports its motion 500 times every second, which is how the system knows the exact instant the ball leaves a player's foot. Each stadium runs 16 tracking cameras that generate more than 150 million data points per match, and every player gets a one-second 3D scan so replays show accurate avatars of the real players involved in a call.

The payoff is speed. Offside calls that used to bounce to a video booth now go straight to the officials on the pitch, so the game keeps moving. And the part I want every business owner to hear: with all of that AI in the loop, humans still make every final call. The technology gives the referees a faster, clearer picture. The decision stays with a person.

What this means for the rest of us

You can sit out a lot of AI hype. This is not that. When the most-watched event on the planet builds AI into the ball, the broadcast, the officiating, and the marketing, the question of whether AI belongs in serious work is pretty much settled. The water is warm.

And notice how they are using it. FIFA's president, Gianni Infantino, framed their new AI analytics tool this way:

"With Football AI Pro, we will democratise access to data by providing the most complete set of football analytics to all competing teams."

That is the whole game for a small business. The point of these tools is to give a smaller operation the kind of capability that used to require a big budget and a big team. A national team with no money for a roomful of analysts now gets the same insights as the giants. Swap "national team" for "your business" and that is the opportunity in plain terms. Pair good tools with people who know the work, keep a human on the final call, and you punch above your weight.

Back to the kid on the field

The same game I grew up loving is now the proving ground for the exact tools I help businesses put to work. That is a strange and great thing to get to watch.

So enjoy the tournament. And if seeing all this makes you wonder where AI actually fits in your world, not the hype, the real version, that is one of my favorite conversations to have.