On June 24, I divided my attention. The final matches of the World Cup’s group stage, played concurrently within each group since 1982 to prevent match fixing, were as good a use-case as any for FOX One’s Multiview. Scotland–Brazil to the left, Morocco–Haiti to the right; my own miniature World Cup panopticon in the comfort of my living room. I watched without real focus or commitment until Brazil’s Vinicius Jr. dispossessed a Scottish defender to slot home his second goal of the night. Had he done so illegally? The requisite replays to check every goal for possible flaws began. Some thousand-plus miles away in Dallas, a three-person Video Assistant Referee team scrolled through its own bank of screens, then whispered their findings into the ear of César Ramos, the in-person referee in Miami. They had spotted an infraction. As the defender swung his leg back to make a pass to his goalkeeper, he’d nicked Vini’s own and botched the pass in the process. The VAR team determined that this amounted to a foul committed by Vini, allowing him to score, and recommended an on-pitch review.
As Ramos made his way toward the sideline, those of us tuning in from afar were treated to a new, more embodied glimpse of the drama. It was as if the watching world was jogging as one middle-aged man across football’s biggest stage, en route to peer into yet another screen. The grass was a vibrant green, the trot’s steadiness belied by the feed’s innate jostle, the perspective, as a commentator on the Morocco–Haiti match on the other side of my TV would so insightfully offer minutes later when Achraf Hakimi leveled the score, “different from our point of view.” Back in Miami, Ramos heeded the VAR team’s recommendation: The goal would not stand. Justice had been done. And we humble fans at home had gained insight into the beautiful game like never before, courtesy of Referee View Powered by Lenovo AI.
Six months prior, the announcement of this World Cup’s technical stack had been a big enough deal as to occupy center stage at CES 2026, “the most powerful tech event in the world.” That FIFA would use the grand occasion of its newly expanded tournament to sell something AI-enabled that no one particularly wanted felt almost preordained. FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang offered that and more when they stepped on stage at Las Vegas’s Sphere. The tournament would feature a new analytics platform for teams; video-assistant, avatar-enabled play reviews, accurately representing players’ particular bulges via pre-Cup body scans; and the tool that had put us in Ramos’s cleats as he‘d adjudicated a foul that was perhaps not a foul at all: “body-worn referee cameras, stabilized using AI, [to] provide broadcast-ready footage from the official’s point of view.”
FIFA and Lenovo’s presentation took place, coincidentally, on the fifth anniversary of January 6—the footage of which, documented by both police body cameras and traditional ones, strongly contradicts Trump’s recasting of the Capitol insurrection as “a day of love.” This was hardly the only resonance, however. The rollout of Referee View came against the backdrop of ICE, the National Guard, and all other manner of federal police occupying American cities and harassing, abducting, and killing their residents with impunity, the profusion of video evidence from their own body cameras or bystander cellphones be damned. Often enough, this evidence is part of the point: Videos of violent raids feed the right’s lust for mass deportations and unfettered use of force while also spreading fear among its likely targets. The day after FIFA and Lenovo’s announcement, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renée Good in Minneapolis. Footage from Ross’s own cellphone—ICE’s use of body cams is inconsistent—proved to be grounds for a spurious narrative of self-defense, despite other footage to the contrary. It also captured Ross, having just shot Good three times, calling her a “fucking bitch.”
What all this portended for football fans this summer, drawn into ICE’s scope by the honeypot of the World Cup, appeared of little concern to increasingly brazen Infantino, whose comfort with autocrats is well-established. Just what purpose Referee View serves in his remaking of global football would also have to be seen come Cup time, when referee and police body cam footage would roll together and new variations on the same remarkably consistent theme—a rapid jostling, a hectic scuffle, punctuated by shots and an ultimate stillness—would reach our screens. Their divergent stakes aside, the strange aesthetic and technological symmetry of referee and police body cams (ref cams worn on the head, police cams on the chest), and their shared logic as a way of seeing, provide a particularly unfiltered lens into the modern game—a sport that traffics in populist history while its institutions exercise ever tighter control over how it’s played and how it’s seen.
Ref cams first saw consistent use in professional football at the 2025 Club World Cup, a trial run for this summer, which brought 32 club teams to the US to compete in another Infantino–scheme to make money by exhausting players in the summer heat while ICE picked off celebrating fans. (Point of View shots are more common in other sports, the home-plate umpires in baseball and referees in hockey having intermittently sported cameras for years.) FIFA claimed that earlier version of Referee View as one of the Club World Cup’s big successes, but what I watched amounted to grainy footage that tipped, tilted, and shook to a nausea-inducing degree. I am not alone in my sensitivity; following an experiment with body cameras in last year’s Premier League campaign, an English tabloid was pleased to report that the Sky Sports broadcast was “giving the whole country motion sickness.” More than provide a revealing angle on a well-worked move toward the goal, the tech seemed to mostly offer fish-eye views of players complaining about calls—a time-honored tradition, no doubt, but not one to dwell on. At CES, Lenovo promised to improve at least one element of this experience: New AI-powered image stabilization would hopefully reduce “jitter” and stop the raw material from leaving viewers ill.
Fulfilling the rest of Referee View’s promise would be up to the replay operators in the broadcast studios, splicing together the video feeds that blanket each stadium: Spidercams crawl, suspended overhead along webs of wires; the fixed cameras swivel with play, the fan cams roam to capture staged enthusiasm; and the goal cams rattle with each triumphant touch of the net. That a novel on-field view might add further sparkle to an already gleaming occasion is not an unreasonable assumption. Football is a game of angles and anticipation, its slickest purveyors masters of foresight—of a run to be made, the shifting constellation of bodies in space that results in an opening to be exploited by a deftly weighted pass executed through inexplicable muscle memory. Maybe getting on the level of the players could better capture this genius where existing, often shockingly good footage sometimes fails.
But referees are not camera operators, nor should they be. They already have an increasingly broad remit and work under intense pressure—catching the game’s greatest moments for a viewer is not among their priorities. When César Ramos made his way to the pitch-side monitor before ruling out Brazil’s second goal, he made no judgement as to the entertainment value of livestreaming his perspective from the AV contraption strapped to his head. That was automatic. Ramos was merely a cyborgian bipod, an Unsteadicam, another vehicle for moving yet more lenses about the carpet. The moments leading up to VAR decisions are typically tense, the drama captured in images of players biting their jerseys and fans covering their face in anticipation. In their stead, Referee View served up an underwhelming, if poetic, picture of a video screen waiting at the end of a green corridor.
Granted, this was a somewhat atypical use of the ref cam material, relative to other broadcasts in the Cup thus far. More often, we’ve gotten replays of a goal or an uncontroversial foul. But Ramos’s VAR stare-down is not alone in its oddity. Halfway through the group stage, I attended the Norway–Senegal match in New Jersey with an eye toward comparing the broadcast with the game in-person, only to see the ref cam make a surprise appearance on the Jumbotron: As referee Wilton Sampaio greeted Norwegian captain Martin Ødegaard before the match, we caught a thrilling view of two clasped hands. The referee’s presence, let alone his perspective, then blessedly faded into the background as the teams took precedence. In the moment, I didn’t even clock who the ref was, absorbed by the run of play as seen from my own unbroken point of view.
A few days later, I returned to that same match by way of a broadcast recording. I had, of course, missed things from up the side of the bowl. I hadn‘t known Norwegian royalty were among us, seated not far from Erling Haaland’s father and Infantino himself. The celebrations after one of Haaland’s goals had taken place so close to me that my view of the Norwegian juggernaut hitting Thierry Henry’s iconic corner flag pose was obstructed by other fans. I was also spared Haaland’s exasperated lip fluttering after another one of his many charging runs ended without the ball at his feet. I didn‘t clock a Norwegian player’s late-game cramping or a possible handball in the eighty-fourth minute. Was my experience worse for its lack of multi-cam insights? No, and the broadcast audio sorely missed the color of my seatmate, who muttered “fucking Nicholas Jackson” every time the fringe Chelsea man touched the ball for Senegal.
Rewatching the match proved to be a literal out-of-body experience. I was there, just out of the camera’s frame, and I was looking down from above via the televised footage. I had memories of every play; they were familiar but dreamlike. I could anticipate what was about to occur, but only the broad strokes of how it would look. Being on the pitch, however, hadn’t been possible for me at MetLife Stadium, barring arrest. So I waited for Referee View to make its mark, to bring me back into the stadium in a new way, with fresh perspective. Its first opportunity came in the twenty-seventh minute, when Fucking Nicholas Jackson skied a decent opportunity into the stands. Six seconds of ref-cam footage showed just that with little additional insight and added tilt; had the quality been better, I might have caught sight of myself as Sampaio’s head swiveled to catch the mishit ball’s trajectory. In the thirty-eighth minute, we were served a jiggling rendition of Haaland’s knockdown to Ødegaard and Édouard Mendy’s fine save on the resulting shot. The camera’s twitch from right to left captured, at best, the swiftness of play, but not in a particularly novel way.
In the fifty-ninth minute, when the ping-ponging chaos of an uncleared ball in the Senegalese box led to Haaland’s second goal, the feed resembled the perspective of a washed-up footballer perpetually behind the play, just catching up before the action whisked elsewhere. Soon after, as Mendy lay stricken, injured in an unsuccessful save attempt, viewers were treated to a clever, though banal, editing trick. An overhead camera zooms into the huddle of trainers surrounding Mendy before switching to Referee View inside it, where we see . . . Sampaio pointing at the player amid the crush of bodies. What exactly was happening? This insider’s view provided only pedestrian confusion and a close-up shot of two stubby fingers. Perhaps more telling was what wasn’t shown from the referee’s perspective. In the seventy-fourth minute a Norwegian defender in the box appeared to elbow Senegal’s Idrissa Gueye in the head, only for appeals for a penalty to be waved away. Did it warrant one? It was an edge case, one that a view from the individual who’d decided it might have clarified. But that vantage point, the kind we might expect of Referee View, was inexplicably unavailable.
By the end of the group stage, the ref cams had achieved the filmic equivalent of Alexi Lalas’s commentary: They had failed to entertain or provide insight. I struggled to see how one writer could describe their offering as “brilliant,” while another dubbed it “the future of football broadcasting.” Even the closer-to-reality statement that it “produces some amazing content for social media” seemed overwrought. But perhaps the ref cam’s vacuity is its core contribution. If nothing else, Referee View is emblematic of today’s visual and technological culture, and that culture’s appropriate manifestation within the most popular—and, increasingly, most monetized—sport in the world.
Here is another AI integration that has been thrust upon us with no sense of real benefit—another giant corporation’s self-fulfilling promise of its technology’s ubiquity, this time justified by its supposed contribution to sport. As a mechanism of constant video capture, Referee View is akin to our whistling doorbells and lurking dashboard cameras, our GoPros and selfie sticks, always on so that nary a moment on the porch, street, or slope, goes unrecorded. Like the Kylie Jenner Meta Glasses advertisements supplanting commentary during the hydration breaks, ref cams are right at home in our age of constant surveillance as the norm.
The specific perspective ref cams offer—Point of View—also speaks to their contemporaneity. First-person video games have inured and endeared many to the sight of hands swinging at the bottom of a screen. This dates back as far as Doom on PC and Goldeneye 007 on N64, these hands more often than not also carrying a gun. Among the roles players of first-person shooters most often take up are as military or the police (the line between the two in real life having become increasingly blurry), a phenomenon those institutions haven’t failed to notice. The US military has developed its own games, shaped the narratives of blockbuster franchises like Call of Duty, and encouraged first-person shooter play among troops as a way to recruit, propagandize, and keep off-duty soldiers in a combat mindset. Police departments across the country are using e-sports tournaments for “community outreach.” The target populations of these efforts—largely but not exclusively young men—might watch body cam footage of a police killing or military raid on social media, then mimic the same action themselves in game form. For some, watching the very real, now ubiquitous snuff films that are the residue of police killings is a dark form of entertainment itself; some go even further, filming and livestreaming mass shootings and other acts of violence in an explicit nod to virtual space.
This link between referee and police body cams is likely as unintentional as it is perverse. But referees are ultimately football’s cops, the game and its hierarchies of power offering another refracted view of society not unlike the video games that pioneered first-person aesthetics and the technology required to produce them. (Lenovo has invested heavily in a line of hardware outfitted with the kind of processing power sought after by gamers, marketed with the slogan “Choose Your Weapon.”) And much like video games are now made to be watched by the millions tuning in live on streaming platforms or recorded on YouTube, body cams, too, have their audience. They are more than a means of transparency; they are also tools of surveillance.
I had looked skyward as I alighted in the Meadowlands ahead of the Norway–Senegal match. Storms threatened to delay the match, and a deluge had just passed. Against the backdrop of purple clouds, to the right of the American Dream mega mall, hovered two drones. Whether they were there for broadcast, security, or perhaps a feed for both, I wasn’t sure. But the organs of security were unmistakable. The gauntlet we’d run between Penn Station and the swamp where the match would take place had been riddled with cops: NYPD, Transit Police, National Guard, NJ State Troopers, Unidentified Militarized Police (UMP!). Were they, too, cammed up? I couldn’t get many close looks in the rush, but I was confident my passage to the stadium had been captured, logged, and beamed to a hard drive somewhere for processing or to languish in data storage.
Lenovo, like most tech companies, sees law enforcement as a key market, and it sells its various products as a means of parsing the immense amount of data that today’s surveillance state produces. It doesn’t produce the cameras themselves (though Motorola Solutions, the other half of Motorola Mobility that Lenovo acquired in 2014, also a prominent World Cup sponsor, does). Instead, Lenovo deals higher up the supply chain: What do you do with the resulting files? How do you store them? How do you make them more usable, more accessible? Providing the back-end infrastructure for functional surveillance is where Lenovo focuses its efforts. “Police officers are often in a state of continuous evidence collection, especially with body cameras. The handling and storage of that evidence often requires multiple different types of media, devices, and reporting—eating up hours of valuable time in an officer’s week,” Lenovo tells us. “This has started to change thanks to automation and cloud-based evidence processing.”
The arguments made for police body cameras are exaggerated at best and propaganda at heart, sold by liberal reformers and the police themselves as a shortcut to accountability: Gone would be the days of false reports. The tape would show the facts of the matter, bad actors would be punished, and bad actions deterred by the cameras’ mere presence. The cameras would watch the watchers. Tell that to the families of Tyre Nichols, Sonya Massey, Daunte Wright, Ronald Greene, and countless others. Rather than establishing the facts, body cam footage is often just a new site of contested reality, no matter how incongruous with the tape the guilty party’s bad faith commentaries tend to be. But body cams’ failure to deliver us police accountability is balanced by their great success at expanding surveillance, as Lenovo concedes in its pitch to law enforcement. Cops all across the country move through their communities as mobile surveillance units, whose footage is increasingly integrated with facial recognition technology and ever-expanding databases. The surveillance state, it turns out, is not particularly interested in righting the wrongs of its own misconduct.
A similar justification is made for ref cams: By getting closer to the action, we’ll be able to see what truly occurred, and armed with the truth, we’ll hold all—players, coaches, refs themselves—to account. That is in essence what Video Assistant Referee is already supposed to be. VAR surveils the game, looking for missed calls and overturning mistaken ones with the panache of hard-boiled terminology. “Serious foul play” is a phrase spoken as VAR reviews a studs-up tackle into the ankle of a player’s standing leg, one criterion for which is “excessive force.” The quarterfinal between Switzerland and defending champions Argentina featured a novel sentence of this kind: After the referee brandished a yellow card to an Argentine defender following a challenge, VAR intervened, and a yellow bubble reading “MISTAKEN IDENTITY” captioned the replay. The ref had disciplined the wrong player, the VAR team concluded. The Swiss player involved in the challenge had dived, an infraction termed “simulation” for which he then harshly received his second yellow. His team was damned to play out the ensuing extra time with ten men. The VAR room in Dallas watches the watchers.
Of course, this integration of technology into modern football is something of a Faustian bargain. Using ever more cameras to spot otherwise imperceptible rule-breaking or to correct the inevitable refereeing mistake is intended, we’re told, to ensure football’s integrity. It promises to allow us to focus on a purer game whose results are unsullied by errors or wrongdoing gone unpunished. In doing so, technologized officiating aims to take some of the focus off of referees. Rather than removing referees from the spotlight, however, VAR often achieves the opposite, thrusting both refs and the technology itself front and center. The human and nonhuman errors that follow necessitate ever more simulations, more angles, and still more technological solutions to justify their own necessity.
Thus far in this World Cup, though, it doesn’t appear that ref cams play any real role in adjudicating calls. They rarely if ever show up in actual VAR reviews. Other footage is far more useful, and looking at a different point of view than the one that delivered the initial call in question makes obvious conceptual sense. If we’re to avoid the alluring explanation of corrupt or irredeemably biased officials, we must believe that if the ref had seen what the (other) cameras saw, he wouldn’t have made or missed the calls that he did. Maybe Referee View can help us hold refs accountable in the court of public opinion, but even that largely ineffective mechanism would require access to the ref cam footage. So far this summer, as during last year’s trial run, nary a controversial or blown call is played back for viewers from the ref’s point of view, a limitation that is entirely by design, FIFA having laid out in explicit policy that nothing even vaguely controversial should be seen from the “unique and dramatic viewpoint from the very center of the field.”
Even some among the largely ref-friendly commentator corps have let slip hints of frustration at this state of play. During Argentina and Austria’s group stage match, a Messi shot was tipped out of play by Austria’s goalkeeper only for the referee to erroneously award Austria a goal kick. “Officiating has to be better than this,” Darren Fletcher growled, exasperated, while his co-commentator Owen Hargreaves muttered about the camera “right behind his ear.” The fan’s age-old question—“how could you miss that?”—went unanswered, new technology notwithstanding.
So what are ref cams for? Far from decentering refs, the body cams intentionally frame them as protagonists with whom we are supposed to empathize, whose eyes we should learn to see the world through. Chairman of FIFA’s Referees Committee and preeminent example of the-referee-as-protagonist Pierluigi Collina (who, in his day, was known for shouting right back at unruly players) said as much when interviewed in the lead up to the Club World Cup. For Collina, the body cams are both, reasonably, a tool for refs to improve by analyzing their own performances and re-observing the finer points of their positioning and judgement, and a way for fans to “put themselves in the referees’ shoes” to help them “understand how difficult a referee’s job could be.”
It’s a worthy goal. Theirs cannot be a pleasant experience, and I empathize with a role that is far from enviable. (Far down the football pyramid from the World Cup’s truly consequential calls, referees in youth leagues in the UK and Canada have also taken to wearing body cams in order to deter and capture the verbal and physical abuse they face from players and, more commonly, players’ parents.) But technology is unlikely to solve this. No matter how much we try to standardize calls through semi-automated procedures and slow-motion replays, all but the likes of offsides are ultimately subjective and thus never safe from inconsistency or bias. Even the most reasonable of fans, among which I (maybe erroneously) count myself, traffic in what are likely unfair conspiracies of referee corruption when a call goes one way for one player, and the other for another. And why wouldn’t we, when the same charges against the game’s governing body have long since evolved from common hunch to proven allegation to the unfortunate reality to which we’re all resigned?
In this environment, FIFA’s approach seems destined to backfire, regardless of how tightly they control every angle of match footage. If fans actually had unrestricted access to the ref cam feed, would they not be just as likely to find evidence of fallible, inconsistent, or biased referees? While it’s just as absurd to think the average fan could do any better in a ref’s shoes than in an athlete’s, seeing like a ref might in fact bolster the idea that we could. Which is why we do not have such access, as FIFA seeks to preempt new opportunities for us to doubt referees by tightly controlling the novel footage ref cams produce, a censorious half-solution to a problem they themselves created. In doing so, FIFA has engaged in yet another mode of obfuscation that calls it and its referees’ integrity into question all the more.
FIFA’s control and manipulation of what the ref cam publicly shows resembles a farcical reenactment of how the police present their own footage. Body cams, no matter who wear them, are the means to a kind of transparency without accountability. Even a clear, stabilized image can be used to obscure, if the body cam even manages to capture the moments most worth seeing. In the Meadowlands, witnessing Ismaïla Sarr pick up the ball and stride down the right wing, or Martin Ødegaard slip a pass through sliding bodies, left me with a particular kind of peace to which I’d grown unaccustomed when watching game after game on television. It came from the game’s quiet, innate beauty—then untouched, for me, by all the views of the commentariat and their camera fodder. We can watch too closely, too incessantly. The looming bald head of Gianni Infantino at nearly every match, ferried from stadium to stadium via private jet, does well to remind us as much.
