The next time you watch a VAR offside decision at the 2026 World Cup, the player figures rotating on screen aren’t generic computer-generated mannequins. They’re digital replicas of the actual players involved, built from individual body scans taken of all 1,248 players from all 48 nations before the tournament began. Each scan takes about one second – the result is an AI-generated avatar that matches the real player’s body shape, proportions and number.
Past tournaments relied on cartoonish, generic models to depict potential offside positions – figures that served as placeholders rather than accurate representations of the players themselves. FIFA and Lenovo, the tournament’s official technology partner, announced the change in January 2026, describing it as an industry first. At the heart of the system is Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT), which relies on a network of 29 dedicated cameras to capture player movement across the pitch at 50 frames per second, ensuring highly granular spatial data.
Why The Upgrade Is More Than Just A Visual Polish
The primary benefit is improved clarity. When a borderline offside decision goes to VAR and the replay shows the moment of the pass, the individual body part that was offside – a shoulder, a knee, a heel – now appears on a figure that looks like the actual player rather than a placeholder shape. The argument from FIFA is that this makes the decision feel less arbitrary. Viewers can see that the line is being drawn against a model of the real person, not a generic proxy.
It’s worth being precise about what this technology does and doesn’t do. The AI avatars appear only during offside VAR reviews, which occupy a few seconds of a 90-minute match. They don’t appear in highlights, goal replays, or live action – real camera footage remains the broadcast standard for everything else. This isn’t broadcast television replacing footage with AI reconstruction – it’s a very specific technical application to a very specific decision-making tool, for a very specific few seconds.
The technology’s narrow scope is precisely what makes it noteworthy. The true achievement isn’t just what it does today, but the infrastructure that had to be built to make it possible.
What It Takes To Build A Digital Twin Of A Player
Scanning all 1,248 players in a tournament takes an enormous amount of coordination. While each individual scan takes only a second, the logistical challenge of capturing data for every registered player across 48 national squads prior to the tournament is far from trivial. The resulting models need to be accurate enough to hold up under forensic replay scrutiny – since the whole point is to determine whether a body part was offside by centimetres.
The 29-camera SAOT system that feeds positional data into the avatar model was originally introduced at the 2022 World Cup for semi-automated offside tracking. What’s new for 2026 is mapping individualised player geometry onto that positional data, so the replay shows not only where a player was but what their specific body looked like in that position. The step from generic shape to individualised avatar is technically modest compared to what the underlying tracking system already does – but it’s symbolically significant.
Where Does This Go Next?
The infrastructure now exists to produce AI-generated replicas of every player at a major tournament, automatically, in real time. At the moment, this is used only to clarify a rules decision that most viewers find confusing. But the same technology could, in principle, be used for much more.
Imagine offside aside – what if the same body-scan-to-avatar pipeline was used to generate replays from angles no camera covers, to show what a tackle looked like from directly beneath the players involved, or to reconstruct a goalmouth scramble from a bird’s eye view that no broadcast camera was positioned to capture.
As these capabilities evolve, distinguishing between real footage and AI-driven recreations will become a bigger challenge. For now, the line is clear: real camera footage for everything that happens, AI avatars for the few seconds it takes to explain why VAR ruled a goal out. That’s a reasonable place to draw it – whether it stays there is the more interesting thing to watch.
