A VLC media window with a live feed of a soccer field. Players are just starting to come off the sideline to play.

Rickrolling The World Cup

June 22, 2026 by Navarre Bartz 26 Comments

Sometimes, hacking requires a certain amount of restraint, especially when you find a system woefully unsecured. It would be so easy to play some pranks, but [bobdahacker] chose not to rickroll the entire FIFA World Cup.

The fun starts after [bobdahacker] signed up for a free FIFA agent profile. After a simple ID verification process, he had a login for the FIFA Agent platform, but they used the same account system across the whole organization in Microsoft Entra. When he tried to access the FIFA Football Data Platform system, it returned an error saying he had no assigned role to allow access. This was on the client side though, so he was able to bypass the error as the server didn’t block accounts without assigned roles.

Once inside, he found he was able to access not just the data, but had full control of the RTMP ingest URLs of all the FIFA matches. For those of us less conversant in streaming media protocols, “Those RTMP ingest URLs are the literal pipe from the stadium cameras to FIFA’s broadcast distribution chain. Camera -> RTMP ingest -> MediaKind -> broadcast partners -> your TV.” He could’ve shut off the feeds or injected whatever alternate stream he wanted, but instead chose to try contacting FIFA, their streaming contractor, and various law enforcement agencies since the World Cup was already underway when he made the discovery.

“Competitions, Matches, Teams, Tools, Exchange Platform, Analysis Dashboard, Commentator Information System, FIFA AI Pro, Admin” were also in the open. Live match scores could be changed, player bios, and any number of other stats could be modified. We’ll let you imagine the possibilities of what mischief could occur.

While rickrolling the world would be funny, a rickroll throwie will be a bit more circumspect. If you’re more interested in soccer/football than security hacks, we hope you enjoy this LEGO soccer tank or these robot soccer players and avoid any soccer ball-sized meteorites or legal troubles for your soccer-related invention.

Calling World Cup Goals Before They Happen, By Polling A Betting Site

February 16, 2019 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

[Ben] made an interesting discovery during the FIFA World Cup in 2018, and used it to grant himself the power to call goals before they happened. Well, before they happened on live TV or live streaming, anyway. It was possible because of the broadcast delay on “live” broadcasts, combined with the sports betting industry’s need for timely and detailed game state tracking.

He discovered that a company named Running Ball provides fairly detailed game statistics in digital form, which are generated from inside the stadium as events occur. An obvious consumer of this data are sports betting services, and [Ben] found a UK betting site that exposed that information in full inside their web app. By polling this data, he measured a minimum of 4 seconds between an event (such as a goal) being reported in the data and the event occurring on live TV. The delay was much higher — up to minutes — for live streaming. [Ben] found it quite interesting to measure how the broadcast delay on otherwise “live” events could sometimes be quite significant.

Knowing broadcast delays exist is one thing, but it’s a neat trick to use it to predict goals before they occur on “live” television. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen evidence of [Ben]’s special interest in data and using it in unusual ways; he once set up a program to play Battleship over the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), making it very probably the first board game played over BGP.

Soccer Playing Robots Score On Human Goalie!

August 4, 2014 by James Hobson 22 Comments

Soccer robot scores on humans

Did you know there’s a rather large community dedicated to making robots that can play soccer? Did you know they’re getting pretty good?

RoboCup is an international robotics competition held annually, first founded in 1997. The goal first and foremost is to promote robotics and AI research — and to do so, they decided to make the competition something that is publicly appealing — Why not one of the most popular sports around? The official goal of the project is to have a team of autonomous humanoid based robot players beat the most recent winning team of the World Cup, complying with the official rules of FIFA. This year, the RoboCup coincided with the real World Cup, and was hosted in Brazil.

There are several categories in RoboCup with various types of robots, and the mid-size team did pretty well this year.

Arguably, this is the most exciting game of all, because it gives a sense of what the current state-of-the-art in robotic soccer is, and how it stacks up to a team of moderately talented squishy bipeds.

We guess that’s a nice way of saying “non-professional soccer players”. Regardless though, they SCORED!

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