AI technology is being widely deployed at the FIFA World Cup in North America, leading tech media to call it an AI World Cup.

It includes a sensor-equipped ball, real-time tracking, AI-based offside decisions and an AI assistant for each of the 48 teams.

A Rest of World report on June 23 said behind the innovations are data workers in places such as India, Cambodia and the Philippines. They watch video and classify and tag actions such as passes, shots and tackles so AI can learn.

Football adopted data analysis 20 years ago, and now almost all national teams and major clubs use it for recruitment, training, tactics and injury prevention. Rafael Grohmann (라파엘 그로만), a professor of media studies at the University of Toronto, said football has relied on such work for far longer than the current AI boom. He said high-value data analysis is concentrated in a small number of wealthy countries, while data annotation work is concentrated in cities in Eastern Europe, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia.

Many data labelling workers are football players themselves or have extensive knowledge of the sport, the report said.

Rest of World said a player in the Philippine football league said he did data labelling for about a year at Packingsports, the Manila unit of German data analytics company Impect.

He said he tagged passes, shots and tackles while watching European league matches. He added that during major tournaments such as the FIFA World Cup or the UEFA European Championship, demand for data from teams, analysts and media surges, sharply increasing workloads.

A freelance data labelling worker in Rio de Janeiro who tags local matches said, "It definitely seems like the data I enter is used for sports betting."

He receives about 60 euros per match plus transportation costs and enters key data such as goals, corner kicks, cards and penalties in real time. He said, "Betting companies need to adjust odds in real time without waiting for official reports, so if you send data late, you can lose some or all of your pay."

Scott Powers (스콧 파워스), a sports analytics professor at Rice University, said computer vision algorithms are gradually automating tasks that data labelling workers used to do manually. Even so, he added, "I have not yet seen evidence that generative AI has revolutionised the football field."

This World Cup is expected to generate about $9 billion in revenue, making it the most profitable sports event ever.