By Jonida Lakuriqi *
Full disclosure, before kickoff: I have been a fan of Spanish football since the Barça of Guardiola and I work in telecommunications. So yes, this piece is biased if you support any other team.
Watching Spain, the European champions, lift the World Cup on American soil, while the footage crossed the globe in a few milliseconds, over 5G networks, backed by thousands of smart cameras and real-time digital systems, I saw two contests. One Europe had just won, on the pitch. The other, behind the spectacle, America is leading, for now.
The trophy drew the world’s attention, but the stadium itself told a more revealing story: Referees wore body cameras giving viewers a first-person view of the game. The ball’s 500Hz sensor feeding real-time data to VAR, redefining handball and contact calls. High-speed cameras tracked the players for offside decisions, while digital avatars made those rulings easier to explain. Players’ biometric vests monitored workload, fatigue and injury risk. Generative AI gave every federation scouting-level insight in real time. And 5G and cloud infrastructure carried it all to billions of screens, in near-perfect unison.
Europe lifted the trophy. America demonstrated what a digital ecosystem looks like when infrastructure, AI, and the cloud function as a single, integrated whole.
Spain won the typical Spanish fashion: with homegrown talent schooled for years in football academies, with tactical discipline and a team where everyone plays for everyone else. Their brilliance lied not in one player dribbling past three defenders, but in the certainty that the next pass was always available. A system, built patiently, finally delivered its return.
Europe too has a knack for systems. Airbus turned pooled industrial ambition into a global aviation champion CERN, made scientific research a shared European endeavor. For three decades, Erasmus, has shaped a generation of Europeans who study and think beyond borders, The euro remains perhaps history’s most ambitious experiment in economic integration. GSM turned a European mobile standard into a global one. Europe’s strength has never been winning sprints, but the ability to build institutions and infrastructure that create value for decades. In telecommunications alone, European operators have poured hundreds of billions of euros in fiber, 5G, and cybersecurity. This work rarely makes headlines, much like in football, much of what determines the result happens before the first whistle.
This is where the contrast with the United States begins. While Europe built the infrastructure, America built the platforms that capture the greater share of value on top of it: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, OpenAI. These aren’t just successful companies but part of an ecosystem where capital, universities, scientific research, and telecommunications reinforce each other. This is not intended as criticism – the modern economy wouldn’t be what it is without them. But the distinction holds: Europe laid the pitch. America produced the champions who play on it.
If Europe is to be competitive in the age of artificial intelligence, infrastructure alone will not not suffice. It must also make continued investment in that infrastructure economically worthwhile.
This is the substance of the European debate over the proposed Digital Networks Act: should platforms whose services account for much of the network traffic – streaming, cloud, AI – contribute directly to the cost carrying that traffic, or, as is currently the case, leave telecom operators to bear it alone. There is no artificial intelligence without high-speed connectivity, no cloud without networks, and no digital economy without the infrastructure beneath it.
Europe need not import American or Asian models fashioned under different conditions. As in football, its genius lies in patient construction of systems designed to outlast any single match, championship, or generation. Europe need not change its character. It must change the rules of the game.
For Albania, this is no distant argument in Brussels. As the country moves towards European integration and invests in 5G, fiber optics, and digital transformation, the challenge is not merely to lay the network. It is to ensure that upgrading it remains commercially viable. Digital Europe will be built in Tirana as surely as in Berlin or Madrid—one kilometer of fiber and one 5G antenna at a time.
The World Cup final offered one last lesson: fair play does not enforce itself. When the match turned rough, the referee set the limits. In the digital economy, that role belongs to European and national institutions. Their task is not to pick winners by fiat, but to create conditions in which capital is invested, infrastructure is rewarded, competition is preserved and innovation is allowed to flourish.
There was something appealing about the closing ceremony: in a stadium in New York, thousands of miles from home, as the American president handed over the trophy, Europe carried the title back across the Atlantic. Home advantage, it turns out, is not destiny.
Now comes the decisive pass. Europe need not change its DNA; it must to ensure that patience, investment, and long-term construction are rewarded as generously as speed, scale and the capacity to monetize them. Only then will those who built the pitch get a fair shot at winning on it.
In football, this means lifting the trophy. In the digital economy, it means building the champions of tomorrow.
* Jonida Lakuriqi is Director of the Legal, Public Policy, and External Relations Department at Vodafone Albania.
