Dr. Fahad Humayun
Assistant Professor in the Ball State University College of Communication, Information and Media. He teaches and conducts research on disruption in journalism, particularly sports journalism. His research has been published in prestigious journals such as Digital Journalism and Journalism Studies, and he is a recipient of research awards from the International Communication Association (ICA) and the Association for Education in Mass Communication and Journalism (AEJMC).
BlueSky: @fahadhumayun.com
Email: fahad.humayun@bsu.edu
The FIFA World Cup has long served as a site where new media technologies become part of everyday sports consumption. Television transformed the tournament into a global live event. The internet facilitated continuous news coverage, while social media enabled audiences to participate directly in public discourse that had previously been mediated primarily by journalists. Following this tradition, for the 2026 World Cup, FIFA expanded its digital strategy further by partnering with TikTok to introduce ‘Creator Correspondents‘ producing platform-specific coverage alongside traditional broadcast journalism.
On the face of it, generative artificial intelligence seems to represent another stage in this evolution. OpenAI introduced a dedicated World Cup experience within ChatGPT that enables users to access fixtures, standings, knockout brackets and match information through a conversational interface. The platform does not produce original sports reporting; it represents a change in how audiences access journalistic content. Instead of consuming sports news through sports news’ own platforms for tournament coverage, audiences can interact with generative AI to obtain sports news produced by the sports journalists. This is another step in a series of attempts to swing the point of interaction from news organizations to AI platforms, weakening the direct relationship between audiences and the journalists whose reporting underpins much of the information users consume.
As AI platforms make their entry in mediating sports information, the central challenge for journalism is preserving its institutional visibility. This challenge is two-dimensional. First is the visibility at the institutional level: for example, the introduction of ChatGPT’s World Cup interface has generated attention primarily within the technology press rather than the sports media. OpenAI announced the feature through its product release notes as one of several enhancements to the ChatGPT application, alongside pronunciation tools and interface improvements. Subsequent coverage appeared largely in technology publications that evaluated the feature as part of ChatGPT’s expanding capabilities rather than as a development in sports journalism. OpenAI even partnered with Lionel Messi as part of their FIFA World Cup and represented the company’s largest consumer marketing campaign to date; but the announcement received relatively little attention from mainstream U.S. news organizations.
The second challenge is at the level of the platform: news organizations have spent two decades adapting to platforms that mediated audience attention while continuing to depend on referral traffic to sustain advertising revenue and audience loyalty. Generative AI introduces a different economic logic. Rather than encouraging users to continue their information journey on publishers’ websites, AI systems increasingly complete that journey within the platform itself. Researchers note that news publishers are increasingly concerned that AI assistants will satisfy users’ informational needs without generating corresponding traffic to sources, accelerating the decline in search referrals that many news organizations have already experienced.
The implications are both editorial and economic. Over the past two decades, news organizations have adapted to successive changes in digital distribution, including search engines and social media platforms. Generative AI introduces another intermediary between producers and audiences. When audiences obtain summaries and explanations without visiting news websites, producers lose the opportunities to develop audience loyalty and advertising revenue. Match reports, tactical analysis and tournament explainers are the visible products of sports journalism, but they depend upon reporting practices such as attending press conferences, interviewing athletes and coaches, cultivating sources and verifying information. Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT do not perform these journalistic functions. But they are simply reorganizing information that has largely been produced elsewhere. If generative AI platforms become a routine entry point for sports information, they may weaken the visibility of the journalistic labor on which they depend.
Generative AI use of the FIFA World Cup to make its entry as a digital intermediary shifts the interpretation of media innovation from sports journalism to technology journalism while simultaneously redefining the relationship between publishers and audiences by making AI platforms, rather than news organizations, the primary point of access to sports information. This development also raises concerns about attribution and informational authority. Research on the “AI turn” in journalism suggests that generative systems alter journalism’s relationship with audiences by relocating interpretation and distribution within platform infrastructures. Evidence supports this concern: users are less likely to visit original sources when summaries appear, reducing publishers’ visibility and weakening the connection between reporting and authorship.
The emergence of generative AI in World Cup coverage should therefore be understood as an institutional development rather than merely a technological one. This shift raises fundamental questions about the future visibility of sports journalism, the recognition of journalistic labor and the institutional authority of news organizations. As generative AI becomes more deeply integrated into global sporting events, the challenge for sports journalism will extend beyond technological adaptation to preserving its role as the primary producer, interpreter and verifier of sports knowledge.
