Drone Soccer Championship

THE HISTORY

Drone Soccer is an emerging discipline that combines sport, technology, and entertainment into a unique format, played with remote-controlled drones that fly, compete, and score points inside a special arena suspended between gaming and athletic competition.

From its birthplace in Jeonju, South Korea, to the present day, Drone Soccer has continuously evolved and reinvented itself since its inception in 2016. Today, this tech-sporting discipline, which fuses athleticism and innovation, is reinventing itself once again and conquering Europe.

Drone Soccer perfectly embodies the festival's philosophy: it unites the entertainment of the future with STEM education, where engineering and computer science are used to program and repair the aircraft, and inclusivity, being a discipline where gender and age give way to pure skill with the controller.

From a pioneering bet in 2024 with the debut of the Italian Championship, moving through the opening to international matches in 2025, to its ultimate consecration in 2026 with the first historic European Championship: the evolution of this sport in just three years encapsulates the speed, growth, and very essence of WMF.

For the first time in history, Italy will host the first edition of the European Drone Soccer Championship during the three-day event.
Over 20 teams from seven countries - France, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Slovakia, Morocco, and Kazakhstan - will compete for the coveted continental title inside the technological arena of BolognaFiere.

Beyond the competitive side, the Expo Area will offer the WMF Community a dedicated demonstration area for direct interaction. In this space, visitors will be able to test their drone piloting skills, relying on the technical support of professional FIDA instructors and pilots to dive deeper into the dynamics of this futuristic sport.

THE RULES

Learning how to play is not complicated, but it requires knowing a few simple rules. A Drone Soccer match features two teams of five pilots clashing against each other in multiple 3-minute sets. To win the match, a team must score more goals than the opponent by having the striker's drone ball (the designated drone acting as the active ball) completely cross into the goal, from the front to the back. The first team to win two sets wins the match.

One rule that might seem tricky is the offside. This rule states that if the striker enters the opponent's goal from any direction, the team is automatically offside and cannot attempt to score. To clear the offside, all players must return past the midfield line into their own team area. If a drone ball remains out of control in the opponent's area, the offside is not cleared until the player officially declares the end of the set and puts down the remote control.

Furthermore, a penalty can be given if a team scores multiple consecutive goals while ignoring the offside rules.