Bizarre photo shows World Cup footballs being charged before matches

Generally, footballs get pumped with air. Now, they require charging. Yep, you heard that right.

A viral post left people scratching their heads after one user shared an image showing a handful of footballs plugged in at the socket.

Created by Adidas, the official ball, called 'Al Rihla' (an Arabic term translating to 'journey'), has a built-in sensor that measures speed, direction and allows for ball-tracking and offside calls by the VAR.

The small battery is said to last for six hours when active, or 18 days when not.

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"Any time the ball is kicked, headed, thrown or even so much as tapped, the system picks it up at 500 frames per second," Maximillian Schmidt, co-founder and managing director of KINEXON, who manufactured the sensor, said.

"Data is sent in real-time from sensors to a local positioning system (LPS), which involves a setup of network antennas installed around the playing field that take in and store the data for immediate use.

"When a ball flies out of bounds during the course of play, and a new ball is thrown or kicked in to replace it, KINEXON’s backend system automatically switches to the new ball’s data input without the need for human intervention," said Schmidt.

It comes after Cristiano Ronaldo claimed he had scored the opener, but it was difficult to tell even from slow-motion replays.

A statement read: "In the match between Portugal and Uruguay, using the Connected Ball Technology housed in Adidas’s Al Rihla Official Match Ball, we are able to definitively show no contact on the ball from Cristiano Ronaldo for the opening goal in the game.

"No external force on the ball could be measured as shown by the lack of ‘heartbeat’ in our measurements and in the attached graphic.

"The 500Hz IMU sensor inside the ball allows us to be highly accurate in our analysis."

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