La Liga Becomes First League To Use Connected Ball Technology In Every Game

Spanish soccer competition La Liga will introduce Connected Ball technology across all LaLiga EA Sports fixtures from the opening matchday of the 2026/27 season, making it the first national soccer competition to deploy the system league-wide.

A radio-frequency sensor sits inside the official Puma match ball and transmits the ball’s position and the exact moment of contact in real time. Roughly twelve antennas per stadium capture that signal and feed it into LaLiga's existing VAR and semi-automated offside systems.

LaLiga says the sensor does not change how the ball performs, and blind trials with players found no difference in feel, weight, trajectory or balance compared with a standard match ball, according to the league.

The project comes from a partnership between LaLiga, the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), Puma and Kinexon, working together to implement the technology with input directly from officials.

How it works on the pitch

The system targets decisions where fractions of a second matter. That includes offside calls, handball incidents, deflections, corner touches and double-touch situations.

By pinpointing the exact moment of contact, the technology is designed to remove some of the guesswork referees and VAR officials currently face when selecting the right frame.

Every match will use 14 connected balls: one in play, one held by the fourth official, and twelve stationed around the pitch as part of LaLiga's multi-ball system.

The league has built a protocol covering how each ball is charged, checked and validated before kickoff. Connected balls are used only in official matches, not in training or warmups.

A new data product: xBALL

The rollout also introduces xBALL, LaLiga's new official data layer built on top of the Connected Ball feed. It is where the commercial upside sits for LaLiga and its broadcast partners.

xBALL will supply shot speed, spin and trajectory data for use in broadcasts, the LaLiga app and future second-screen products.

The league frames this data as an official part of the match record, which gives LaLiga a proprietary asset it can license or package for broadcasters looking to differentiate their coverage.

A “heartbeat” signal marking the instant of contact will also appear in broadcasts alongside new graphics explaining VAR decisions to viewers, an area where LaLiga has faced criticism over transparency in the past.

Following FIFA’s lead at the World Cup

FIFA introduced connected ball technology first as Adidas built the sensor into Al Rihla, the official ball of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. A 500Hz inertial measurement unit sat at the center of the ball and sent data to the video operation room 500 times per second, allowing precise detection of the moment of contact. That feed paired with twelve roof-mounted cameras tracking up to 29 data points per player to power FIFA’s semi-automated offside system.

The 2026 World Cup, held across the US, Mexico and Canada this summer, pushed the concept further with the Trionda ball. The revamped offside system now flags a player as offside at 10cm rather than the 50cm threshold used in 2022, and FIFA paired the ball sensor with 3D player scans to build digital avatars used for both officiating and broadcast replays.

The gap between the World Cup version and LaLiga’s rollout is frequency, as FIFA deployed connected balls across one 104-match tournament held over five weeks, compared to LaLiga running the same underlying sensor and antenna setup across an entire domestic season.

The technical setup also differs. FIFA’s system leans on optical tracking as much as the ball itself, with roof-mounted cameras building 3D player avatars and cross-referencing them against ball contact data to flag offside positions automatically. LaLiga's Connected Ball is built around a wider antenna network per stadium, roughly twelve units capturing the ball's signal directly, and the league has paired it with a fixed 14-ball protocol so every match uses identical hardware in identical positions.

The other difference is ownership of the data. FIFA's connected ball feed serves officiating first and broadcast second, run inside a single global event FIFA controls end to end. LaLiga's Connected Ball generates xBALL, a data layer the league owns as part of its own commercial infrastructure, shot speed, spin, trajectory, built to be licensed into its broadcast deals, its app and second-screen products across 38 gamedays a season rather than one tournament. That turns officiating tech into a recurring revenue asset rather than a one-off showcase.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com