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Paul McNamara

Having created one of the runaway television hits of this summer’s Fifa World Cup, Lenovo is plotting to up the AI ante for the women’s version next year in Brazil.
In addition to building digital twins for all 1,248 players to enhance semi-automated offside technology for the 2026 finals, labelled “the first AI World Cup”, and rolling out an analytical tool aimed at “democratising football”, the tech giants were responsible for Ref Cam, which made its major tournament debut in North America.
Ken Wong, executive vice-president of Lenovo, said the company was “exploring with Fifa what else we can bring” for future tournaments, as well as looking at how they can bring the technology “into the football mainstream”.
“These technologies are only available for Fifa right now, but we want to replicate them so they’re available for everyone,” added Wong, who also serves as president of Lenovo’s solutions and services group.
In the six-to-nine months before the World Cup, Lenovo was tasked with considerably reducing a 40-second wait time for broadcast-quality Ref Cam images.

“There’s a juicy story behind it,” said Wong, talking exclusively to the South China Morning Post in Atlanta.
“Fifa wanted the footage to be processed and available for broadcast within five seconds. Even we could not resolve it in the first place.”
Fifa’s technology partner since 2024, Lenovo entered the collaboration intent on “being aggressive, but with appropriate risk taking”, according to Art Hu, the company’s senior vice-president and chief information officer.
Extraordinarily popular with the World Cup’s global audience of around 6 billion, Ref Cam captured several memorable moments, providing up-close views of challenges and goals, and allowing viewers to see Lionel Messi telling referee Joao Pedro Pinheiro, during Argentina’s quarter-final victory over Switzerland, to “speak to me properly, don’t disrespect me”.
It also recorded Jude Bellingham telling Ismael Elfath, the official for England’s semi-final loss to the South Americans, he had made some “shocking decisions”.
“But all the best,” added Bellingham, giving those watching on television a voyeuristic glimpse into the raw emotions of a man who had just seen his dreams shattered.
“The cameras had to be really small, because the referee is going to wear it for more than 1½ hours,” Wong said. “There are vibrations, rough clashes with players and, sometimes, he’s hit by the ball.
“It also needs a long battery life. A lot of hardware technology is not applicable, we used a lot of AI and software technology because they carry no weight.”

Also the technology provider for Formula One since 2022, Lenovo had experience of delivering moving images from drivers’ on-board cameras.
But Wong confessed he felt “a lot of pressure” in the lead-up to the opening World Cup fixture between Mexico, the co-hosts, and South Africa.
“The technology was proven, but we’d never used it for football,” he said.
“Because I’m so involved, it has almost become business as usual for me, but when this first hit the ground and I saw the feedback from Fifa, from friends and from social media, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really impressive’.”
Regardless of their wish to alert the planet to their artificial intelligence capabilities, Lenovo also had something in common with the referees who wore their cameras: the desire to not generate the legion of headlines that would have followed a high-profile error.
The Beijing-founded, Chinese multinational generated the avatars of players that were used for the semi-automated offside system; and were again forced to provide still-screen images of close calls within five seconds.
“This is a lot of pressure,” Wong acknowledged. “That’s why I sleep two hours a day.
“But we’re not building everything customised for Fifa [from scratch], because we already have our tech stack and offering. We have 32 factories and are pumping out six devices every second.
“To make technology and, especially AI, work, it is critical to have a marriage between the technologist and domain expert, which is Fifa.”
Lenovo and football’s global governing body collaborated to deliver Fifa AI Pro, a platform that assessed more than 2,000 different metrics to provide an analytics tool and tactical simulator for team strategists, and which was made freely available to the 48 teams that competed in the USA, Canada and Mexico.
“It’s like a ChatGPT for Fifa,” said Wong, who rejected the idea that partnering with the global governing body and under-fire president Gianni Infantino risked reputational damage.
“Our job is to provide the technology, it’s up to Fifa to decide how they use it,” he added.
“We used technology to establish the knowledge base, then gave each team the ability to create their own AI agent to dig out the insight they wanted.
“The output could be text, images or video. This is the beauty of the democratisation of the Fifa proprietary data points and insights, and availability of AI to all 48 teams.”
Last year’s Club World Cup, Lenovo’s first major Fifa tie-in, acted as a successful “stress test” for the international bonanza. Soon after, the company repeated their “zero-error computer solution alliance” from the Beijing 2008 Olympics when they flawlessly governed technology for the cross-border 2025 National Games.
“It was the first edition hosted outside mainland China and there was zero margin for error,” Wong said. “The results were quite impressive and there was a lot of excitement around the country and the city.”
Wong reflected similarly contentedly on a World Cup where 48 teams contested 104 matches across three countries, but he conceded that, with another global tournament fewer than 12 months away, he could “never switch off”.
“There’s a lot of work to do for next year,” Wong said. “We’re also having lots of discussions about how we can make [our AI technology] available to the mainstream.
“Pressure exists, but … we proved to the world and to our customer partner that if our technology works for the most complex event and biggest global audience, it’ll work for everyone.”


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Lenovo built cameras that were not only really small so they could be easily worn by officials such as French referee Francois Letexier, but that also had long battery life. Photo: AFP

Lenovo’s Ref Cam took fans into the heart of the action, providing glimpses of interactions between players and referees, like this one involving Lionel Messi (left) and Joao Pinheiro. Photo: AP

Ken Wong, executive vice-president of Lenovo and president of Lenovo Solutions & Services Group. Photo: Edmond So

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Chinese multinational raised the bar for television coverage, now bosses eye bringing their expertise to the game’s mainstream


Chinese multinational raised the bar for television coverage, now bosses eye bringing their expertise to the game’s mainstream.


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Fifa World Cup 2026

Lionel Messi

After Ref Cam lights up World Cup, what’s next for Lenovo’s AI tech in football?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Chinese multinational raised the bar for television coverage, now bosses eye bringing their expertise to the game’s mainstream

Chinese multinational raised the bar for television coverage, now bosses eye bringing their expertise to the game’s mainstream