Football is already the greatest sport for many of us, so the thought of changing any aspects, especially in terms of technology, can seem unnecessary. It’s true that nothing can or will beat the experience of seeing the game live around a passionate crowd, but we need to remember that there’s more than one way to experience what we love.
Looking at what’s available in the world of virtual reality and augmented reality headsets and peripherals, we want to explore what’s on the horizon for fans to look forward to. From smaller changes to aid convenience to completely new ways to engage, there is a huge range of opportunities out there, and they’re closer than you might think.
Customizing Your Home Viewing Experience
For the most basic kind of change we could expect headsets to make to football-viewing, we’ll start with AR headsets. If you’re a fan of watching games on TV, AR would help you by essentially letting you choose your own screen setup, making your viewing window as large as you like.
AR technology would also help by letting you add additional features in other digitally inserted viewing windows. If you’re a fan of placing bets on games, you could open the Premier League 2025/26 betting odds and have them open on another virtual screen, for example. Depending on how your team plays, you could then check performance against the football odds today. If you like Man City, and you thought they played up to their 3/1 outright odds, betting could be more convenient this way than having to switch between a group of different app platforms.
Virtual reality tech could also help by letting you take a virtual seat in the stadium at a live or recorded match. Meta Quest and the NBA have laid the groundwork for this technology already, with players now being able to take a courtside seat from their homes to watch the action. Football has also seen some attempts to break into this trend by companies like Sky Sports, but none have yet reached the level of integration embraced by the NBA.
Still, once this tech does become more widely adopted, it will provide huge advantages over traditional TV viewing. Watching in VR provides an experience as close to the real thing as possible, with the advantage of not requiring any travel, not needing to pay for physical stadium tickets, and not having to face poor weather.
Live Tracking and New Angles of Play
Augmented reality offers additional advantages owing to how well the technology integrates with real-time stat lookups, which are not easily possible with traditional systems. If you’re curious about a player’s shots on goal percentage, for example, you can still look it up online separately on your phone. AR offers the potential for you to simply select a player on screen or by using help systems already integrated with AI chatbots.
You might also be looking for alternative ways to view the action, to pick out players and strategies that are difficult to spot by following a traditional broadcast camera alone. AR could help here by selecting different shots of the field and superimposing them on different virtual screens. A coffee table could then show a live 3D eagle-eye view of a match, offering viewing beyond what is possible in real life.
A Shared Experience
The benefits that AR and VR add to solo viewing are shared by their potential contributions to a communal watching experience. In VR, you could visit the same streamed field as your friends, watching the same live match from right next to the action, even if you’re thousands of miles away.
Future AR will similarly help by providing the ability to stream projections of your friends from across the globe. Whether using avatars to represent their presence or appearing accurately with real video streams, the added level of togetherness this fosters is a big part of what makes football so special. You might be enjoying it in a novel way, but the central component of camaraderie means it’s just as valuable a way to watch.
VR and AR tech have been gaining steady steam over the last decade, with the industry looking towards a 35.6% CAGR from 2025-2034. While it’s true that they haven’t yet captured the imagination of the general public, they’re still technologies that hold too much promise in too many areas to ever disappear. Instead, better tech and opportunities like watching football will continue to prove just how much is on offer, and in cheaper and more capable headset models.
So, you may not need to rush out and buy a headset right now, but consider just how much will be available in the future and what this could do for your love of the beautiful game when it does become more widespread.
