Here comes 'Trionda': Adidas reveals 2026 World Cup ball

Adidas unveiled 'Trionda', the official match ball for the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup. Designed to pay homage to the World Cup's three host nations - Canada, Mexico, and the United States - Trionda stands for three (tri) waves (onda).

The ball is also the brand's most technically advanced ball ever, and it took them more than 3.5 years to design it.

There is also iconography significant to each country featured throughout the ball - a star for the US, a maple leaf for Canada and an eagle for Mexico.

This ball also carries the newest version of Adidas' Connected Ball Technology with a new mounted chip system. It features a 500Hz inertial measurement unit (IMU) motion sensor chip that sits inside a specifically created layer in one of the ball's four panels, as opposed to the centre-mounted system in previous designs.

"A couple of years ago, you would have been called mad if you wanted to place a chip inside a ball and still make it playable," Hannes Schaefke, football Innovation lead at Adidas, told The Athletic. "We introduced the technology in '22, so there is some experience that we could build upon."

The ball technology is designed to send precise ball data to the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system in real time, providing referees with more information to help make faster decisions for calls like offsides. The technology can also help match officials identify each individual touch of the ball.

"One of our key focuses was helping referees make the right decisions and make them as fast as possible," Schaefke said, "because any sort of VAR moment in the modern game is a bit of a disrupt, right, because, as a ref, you need to step outside and need to look at the situation. Offsite decision is one example."

To promote Trionda, Adidas called a handful of World Cup winners and legends to take part of the ball's official release: Lionel Messi, Kaka, Zinedine Zidane, Jurgen Klinsmann, Xavi, Cafu, and Alessandro Del Piero...