All about Trionda, Adidas’ ball for the 2026 World Cup: More rounds of testing, AI advancements

In concept, a ball is the most procedural aspect of the World Cup, arguably the single greatest reminder that no matter how grandiose the world’s most popular sporting event can be, soccer’s trademark is its inherent simplicity. The sport’s reputation is rooted in the fact that, in theory, all a group of people needs is a single, round piece of equipment to enjoy a kickabout. Not all soccer balls are created equal, though, and that is especially true for World Cup balls.

Enter the Trionda, Adidas’ official match ball for the 2026 World Cup co-hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Like previous World Cup balls, it looks the part, the name and design are a reflection of the region that will host the 48-team tournament. “Tri” stands for the three host nations, represented by three colors – blue for the U.S., red for Canada and green for Mexico – while its curved pattern is a nod to “onda,” the Spanish word for wave or vibe. The Trionda’s most unique aspects, though, lie in the invisible elements and its years-long journey to the ball’s unveiling on Thursday at Brooklyn Bridge Park.

“The World Cups are all unique so the balls are also very unique each time.,” Solene Stormann, Adidas’ global category director of football hardware said in an interview with CBS Sports.

While Adidas has some tried-and-true processes in bringing an official match ball to life, the Trionda went through several rounds of innovation and testing before it was the finished product. In the end, the Trionda is a uniquely custom product, one Adidas and FIFA will hope will stay as invisible as the details that went into its creation by the time the first ball is kicked for the opening game at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca on June 11.

Humidity, AI chip taken into consideration

The Trionda is the first official match ball to be designed with a specific climate in mind – or to be more specific, several climates. The 2026 World Cup will take place across 16 host cities as far north as Vancouver, Canada and as far south as Mexico City, each with their own distinct weather patterns in June and July. Adidas took all of that into consideration when designing the Trionda, giving the ball a texture with an extra grip to ensure it feels the same at the players’ feet regardless of venue.

“We know that we have 16 host cities and we wanted to ensure that this ball works everywhere so we wanted to check on what are the differences in terms of the locations,” Stormann said. “We know they have different humidity levels, different altitude levels, different temperature, different weather so we wanted to test against those criteria and make sure this ball works.”

Adidas first tested the Trionda’s ability to perform at different humidity levels in a controlled space before taking it on the road to seven of the 16 World Cup host cities. There, players from the likes of MLS’ Vancouver Whitecaps and Liga MX’s Tigres got to try the product themselves as part of the brand’s testing process.

Like its predecessor Al Rihla, the official match ball for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the Trionda will also have a chip powered by AI, though a few elements are different. The chip will now be lodged in the side of the ball rather than its more central placement four years earlier, its Ai-powered system designed to provide several real-time insights and data for the future. The expectation is that the system will allow referees to make more accurate – and faster – decisions, while the takeaways from the 2026 World Cup will help inform Adidas on their next innovations. The game’s tactical evolution over the years makes previous match balls feel out of date at the feet of modern-day professionals, so Adidas pays just as much attention to those statistics as coaches and analysts as they prepare for what’s next.

“If you look at certain [key performance indicators] in football – the amount of passes, the amount of high-speed running, the amount of sprints throughout the game, all these things are increasing,” Hannes Schaefke, Adidas’ football innovation lead, said. “From a technological perspective, in performance tracking, the ball was sort of the last frontier because it was super hard to track this from an optical standpoint, almost impossible. Some things like touch frequency during a dribble, you [could] never track that without a sensor inside so this is where I think, from an understanding of the game, the depth of how well you understand it and anticipate the future of it, is where having all tracking unlocked is a huge, huge promise for the future.”

‘The most tested ball we’ve ever had’

To some degree, Adidas has a blank canvas when designing official match balls because the variables are constantly changing, refreshing the need for several rounds of testing time and time again.

Those trials have become especially noteworthy since 2010, when the Jabulani used in South Africa was described as a “disaster” and resembled “a beach ball” by goalkeepers who took part in the competition. That ball, as well as the Telstar 18 used in Russia during the 2018 World Cup, received complaints for being hard to control, the trajectory of the ball becoming unpredictable in the process. It is no wonder, then, that several design elements are earmarked for performance. The Trionda, for instance, is stitched together from four fluid panels while Al Rihla was comprised of 20 geometric panels, a change that plays a much bigger role than aesthetics.

“We also see that the panel shape as well as the different groove lines that we applied onto the outer shell … has an influence on the aerodynamics,” Stormann said. ” it’s not about the amount of panels that dictate if it’s performing well or not, it’s more about the combination of the panel with its seam length and the debossing lines, how they are actually assorted around the ball, how they are homogeneously placed so that has actually [an] influence on all the aerodynamic criteria.”

The complaints about the Jabulani and the Telstar 18 only make the aerodynamics more important, so it’s no wonder why so much of the testing process is dedicated to that aspect of performance.

“At Adidas, in-house, we have our own lab where we do, for instance, robo-like testing but we also work with external partners like the Loughborough University. They do wind-tunnel tests so this is all very scientific but here, we can already check against those aerodynamic criteria like in-flight stability, the launch speed, the in-flight speed, the swerve, precision.”

From there, the ball faces its most crucial test – the players.

“We also want to validate it through the players because they also have a perceived way of seeing if it performs for them or not so we also go out there and test this with amateur players [up] until pro players to also get their feedback and validation,” Stormann said.

The ultimate trials, though, will come in the weeks and months before the World Cup. Some competitions will have access to the Trionda fairly early depending on the nature of their contracts, while national teams competing at the World Cup will have the chance to work with the ball – at least during training sessions – three to four months before next summer’s tournament. Time will tell which of its predecessors the Trionda will follow – the ones that became the story or the ones that truly represented soccer’s inherent simplicity, serving as an essential but silent participant in the show.