Google, Fifa 20 and Adidas teaming up to make smart football kit

Smart chips can be woven into real clothes

Matteo Guendouzi kisses (R) Mesut Ozil's new adidas predator boot before a training session at London Colney on January 24, 2020 in St Albans, England (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

Google, the Fifa football games and Adidas appear to be teaming up to make smart football kit.

The trio are using Google's Jacquard, a special fabric that allows smart controls to be woven into normal fabrics. So far that technology has been integrated into a range of different clothing, including Levi's denim jackets and a backpack, allowing people to skip songs or take photographs by swiping their outfits.

But it now appears to be coming to football kit, as part of the tie-up with Adidas' football division.

That is according to a very cryptic tweet that teased an announcement on 10 March.

Included in the tweet were the logos for the Fifa mobile game, Google's Jacquard fabric, and the Adidas logo. It included the message "play connected".

It also included the hashtag "adidasGMR". A blog post from October, on the site Footy Headlines, suggested that name could refer to a special insole that would be placed inside football boots and used to track the player wearing them.

The insoles could be used to track "touch, control, speed and kicks", that post indicated.

The same post indicated that the Adidas app that links with them will connect with the Fifa Mobile Ultimate Team mode, and that players would be given in-game rewards for their play in real life.