Slowly but surely artificial intelligence enters sports. Newest place? During this year’s World Cup, Google will partner with defending champion Argentina to showcase Gemini on and off the pitch.
The agreement with the Argentine Football Association (AFA) makes Gemini the main global sponsor of the national team. As part of the cooperation, the Google Gemini logo will appear on the Albiceleste training kit, and the AI tool itself will be used to analyze the team’s game, form, results and statistics.
“It’s not just about opening the door [to] Artificial intelligence,” says Google spokesperson Flor Sabatini, “but about understanding its real limitations while improving the experience.”
During the tournament, players and coaching staff will have access to artificial intelligence models to analyze plays, analyze opponent statistics and theoretically reduce the time it takes to put that analysis into action on the pitch. Google hasn’t specified exactly what internal tools Argentina will exploit, but the intent is clear: the World Cup will be a stress test for Google’s artificial intelligence in the demanding environment of professional soccer.
For the fan, the proposition is more actual and in some ways more ambitious. Google Search will be reconfigured to work like a regular fan, with AI-generated answers to real-time queries, analysis of key plays and detailed statistics. It will also allow fans to create songs, memes, cartoons and other visual content to encourage social media interaction during and after each match.
According to Google, the search engine giant finalized the deal with Argentina in March but only announced it in May so that it could continue negotiations with other teams. While Google has focused media attention on Argentina – likely because of high-profile players like Lionel Messi – the company has also struck deals with Brazil and France, two other teams that have lifted the World Cup.
Sabatini says that for Google the World Cup is the most vital cultural event of the year. “The passion aroused by the Argentine national team exceeds that of Argentines. These are common emotions,” he emphasizes. From AFA’s point of view, the agreement is an injection of modernity into an institution that, like most teams, balances between football tradition and the urgent need to monetize its brand.
This move comes with risks. Introducing artificial intelligence into World Cup arenas means exposing it to millions of simultaneous queries, diverse cultural contexts and the inevitable variability of match-to-match results. If Gemini gets the statistics wrong, makes up a lineup, or generates an image with a misplaced dial, the error will be perceptible to all the world.
World Cups have traditionally been culture-shaping events that accelerate the adoption of fresh technologies, from the popularization of color television, to the exploit of GPS to measure players’ training sessions, to the exploit of video assistant referee (VAR) technology to resolve disputes over on-pitch calls. Now it’s artificial intelligence.
The difference here is scale. Never before has a technology company put the name of its artificial intelligence on the chests of gamers and on the smartphones of millions of fans at the same time.
This story originally appeared on WIRED in Spanish and was translated from Spanish.