World Cup kicks off: AI also takes the field this time

Lionel Messi approaches the eleven-metre penalty spot at a cadenced pace. He stops. A sigh, a short run-up and the ball goes into the box.

It is 4.23 p.m. Italian time on 18 December 2022, the date that will go down in history as 'the day that shocked the internet'. That moment of the 2022 Qatar World Cup final between Argentina and France was in fact watched live by some 1.5 billion people across all available platforms worldwide: almost 20% of humanity concentrated in a single instant in front of televisions, internet, streaming services, smartphones and other devices. It is estimated that that single minute generated over 500 terabytes of streaming video traffic and around 800 million social media interactions. In practice, those instants alone would have taken up between 4% and 5% of global internet traffic.

With only a few days to go before the whistle blows for the 2026 edition of the World Cup in North America (kicking off next Thursday at 9 p.m. with the Mexico-South Africa match), one can be reasonably certain that that record will be broken. Firstly because four years ago most people still followed football via traditional television, while today the power, in terms of how the event is viewed, is shifting towards social media and digital platforms.

According to FIFA, the Qatar World Cup generated a total of 5 billion media interactions. Traditional television and digital streaming audiences were broadly equivalent (2.9 billion versus 2.7 billion), while social media were not far behind with 2.2 billion. Bank of America, which has dedicated a cyclopean report produced by its analysts to the upcoming World Cup, believes that this year's final could account for as much as 7% of the world's internet traffic, but above all, it recalls that the numbers seen so far were valid before the explosion of artificial intelligence.

"The 2026 World Cup will be the first tournament where data itself becomes a primary product," the analysts write. "All teams will have access to real-time artificial intelligence models capable of analysing millions of data points, as well as three-dimensional simulations of events to build their strategies." And while in the past the richest teams enjoyed a competitive advantage, in 2026 AI will democratise access to data. "All national teams are already using AI systems to process real-time performance metrics that didn't even exist during the previous tournament. We will not simply witness a football match: we will witness a gigantic real-time simulation in which the physical world is constantly being transformed into data at a rate of several petabytes per week."