With two of Europe’s traditional football powerhouses, the Netherlands and Germany, already out of the FIFA 2026 World Cup, the remaining teams are increasingly looking to IoT technologies to help gain an edge in an otherwise tightly contested tournament.
Tonight, when England take on the Democratic Republic of Congo, both sides will be drawing on this same technology. Real-time tracking systems, connected match balls, and wearable biometric devices are continuously generating streams of data that are processed within centralised analytics environments and translated into actionable insights for coaching staff.
FIFA 2026 is quickly becoming known as the most connected World Cup ever. Across the competition, a dense network of connected systems is capturing and transmitting real-time performance data, feeding analytics platforms designed to support coaching decisions, player monitoring, and in-match tactical adjustments.
Teams are making use of wearable biometric devices to capture metrics including heart rate, workload, and recovery levels, optical tracking systems to monitor every movement on the pitch, and connected match balls to generate hundreds of spatial data points per second.
For emerging sides such as the DRC, alongside other lower-ranked nations still in the tournament, AI-assisted analytics are being positioned as a way to narrow the gap with established footballing powers. These systems rely on vast quantities of data generated in real time across the pitch, from player movement tracking to physiological monitoring.
One of the most significant developments at this year’s tournament is FIFA’s Football AI Pro assistant, which allows coaches and analysts to interact with match data using natural language. Instead of navigating complex dashboards or manually filtering datasets, staff can ask questions about pressing structures, positional behaviour, or tactical efficiency and receive near-instant responses.
“At the World Cup, conversational AI assistants—such as FIFA’s Football AI Pro—are being provided to all teams, allowing coaches and analysts to interact with their data in natural language,” says Andrius Kūkšta, Tech Lead in the R&D team at Oxylabs. “This technology is particularly valuable for smaller nations that lack dedicated analytics staff, helping to level the playing field by giving every team advanced, user-friendly access to actionable insights.”
Together, these inputs are fed into FIFA’s central data platform, where they are synchronised and processed into structured tactical intelligence for teams, broadcasters, and analysts. The result is a continuous feedback loop between physical action on the pitch and digital interpretation off it.
Historically, advanced football analytics have been concentrated among wealthier federations with dedicated data science teams and proprietary systems. AI-driven interfaces may reduce that dependence on specialist expertise, but they do not remove the underlying infrastructure gap.
As England take on the Democratic Republic of Congo tonight, the result will ultimately be decided by goals, not graphs. But in the margins, it will be shaped by a constant stream of data that neither side can afford to ignore.
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