A Lenovo partnership may be the only thing FIFA gets right for the World Cup, going by CES 2026

With a wry smile, Daryl Cromer, VP and CTO of Lenovo’s PCs and smart devices division, gave me a bold prediction ahead of Lenovo Tech World.

“It will be the greatest show at CES,” he said. After four hours in the Sphere, with my senses rattled and my eyes popping out of my head, I couldn’t help but agree with him.

Led by its impressive CEO Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo brought the best bits of CES into one evening. If you couldn’t make it to Nvidia on Monday, you were in luck, as the first guest was Jensen Huang, leather jacket and all, talking about an AI Gigafactory announcement.

AMD also held an event on Monday, but that didn’t stop Lisa Su from joining Yang on stage with some very valuable insights into the Ryzen and AMD chips powering the new Lenovo Aura Edition laptops, and its enterprise-grade servers.

It didn’t stop there: Motorola has gone big with its smartphone and AI announcements, and the CEO of Qualcomm talked up the latest developments with Snapdragon.

This was an event that addressed one of the issues of CES: it’s too spread out. A tech conference that needs a convention center and four hotels to accommodate is a nightmare scenario if you want to take it all in. Nvidia in Fountainbleau, AMD in the Palazzo, Qualcomm somewhere up the Boulevard… it all sounds so close, but in reality, it's a lot of legwork. So it was somewhat of a relief to have them all inside the Sphere for a few hours.

But then came Infantino, and I began to fear it was one name too many. The man in charge of the biggest global sports event (possibly ever), the 2026 World Cup, has become an increasingly controversial figure. Which is pretty impressive in itself when you consider his predecessors.

Infantino has bloated the football calendar with extra games, more rounds, and larger tournament formats. The World Cup, for example, is expanding from a 32-team tournament to a 48-game soccer bonanza that needs three countries to accommodate it (USA, Mexico, and Canada). How do you manage an event that sprawls across one of the world’s largest continents?

The answer is multifaceted – but cutting-edge technologies (like AI) are one part of that. And technology doesn’t have a long history in football, not like it does with Formula 1. It’s only in the last decade that it has begun to see the benefits of digital advancements – though this is largely driven by fan engagement. But you can see the opportunities.

Goal-line technology, for example, uses computer vision. You need a strong backroom setup for that. We now have optical tracking which is AI and, again, capable compute systems are needed. And for the 2026 World Cup, teams will use generative AI to get instant information about performance, just by using questions in plain language. Lenovo knows this, and it’s ready to capitalize.

“We definitely want to leverage this sport to promote our brand and our AI, but meanwhile, Lenovo technology can empower this sport,” Yang said during a Q&A session at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

“We think the coming 2026 World Cup will be the most embedded AI event. You will see football AI. You will see AI for the most famous players, and you will see referee cam, which will be very attractive to the audience.”

What I feel will make the partnership successful, aside from the innovative technology, is that Lenovo seems to know how to handle FIFA’s troublesome leader, Infantino. He came out on stage at the very end of Lenovo Tech World, with not much to reveal… he had half the time and attention of Huang and Su. Which makes sense as they actually had things to talk about. Most of the technical details of the World Cup partnership were left to Yang and his charismatic Lenovo leadership team.

Now over 40% of Lenovo’s revenue is non-PC related. It’s one of the biggest providers of back-end infrastructure. For FIFA, for example, Lenovo has built a data platform, its own LLM model, and, what one executive described to me as a footballGPT of applications. This will be used by coaches and players for performance analytics. By broadcasters for hyper-personalized content. And even for organizers to manage smart spaces within the venues.

FIFA might have upset the global football community with some of its decisions, but it does appear to have made the right call for its technology partner.

Lenovo Tech World @CES2026 - YouTube

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