If you send a football emoji on WhatsApp these days, you might encounter a little surprise. WhatsApp, in collaboration with Adidas, has changed the appearance of this emoji to the 'Trivonda', the official ball of the 2026 World Cup.

In the new version, the football emoji is displayed as the Trivonda ball after sending, and it comes to life with a short animation; a simple change that aims to bring the spirit of the World Cup into users' everyday conversations.

The Trivonda is the official ball of the 2026 World Cup; a tournament that will be hosted jointly by three countries: the USA, Canada, and Mexico for the first time. The name of this ball is inspired by this idea; 'Tri' refers to the three host countries, and 'vonda' means wave in Spanish and Portuguese. Its design, with wave-like lines, depicts the connection between the three hosts.

WhatsApp states that football today lives in chat groups more than ever; a place where fans instantly share goals, results, and important moments of the matches. According to the company, over 25 million messages were exchanged per second on WhatsApp during the final of the 2022 World Cup, and this record is expected to be broken in the upcoming World Cup.

This update may not seem like a big change, but it shows that the competition to capture the attention of football fans has now gone beyond the playing field and reached the chat screens of mobile phones.

Source: Gulf News