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Weird

Is AI ruining football?

This is a very serious investigation into a rather scary subject matter…

Is AI ruining football?

Images:

A Robot

I’m going to be honest with you—I hate AI, and by the end of this article I think it will become clear why. If I was kicking about during the industrial revolution, I’d have been one of those Luddites smashing the shite out of looms and whatnot. When I started writing for MUNDIAL back in 2019, they had to teach me what a “Google Doc” was, and when I first saw somebody else remotely typing words into a document I was working on, I was expecting Most Haunted’s Derek Acorah to appear and start filming me.

Derek Acorah was dead within a year of my time at the mag—pneumonia and sepsis. A huge shame, not least because I’ve just discovered he signed schoolboy terms with Bill Shankly’s Liverpool, turned out for the reserves, and had a brief stint at Stockport County. If you’re out there, Derek, I’d like to interview you, perhaps via a Ouija board.

Anyway, AI. Fucking inescapable, isn’t it? Can’t shake it. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announced he’s embracing it fully and that we should all do the same. It’s going to end up like the internet, becoming so crucial to the way modern life functions that we reach a point of no return—at the mercy of the machines forever and ever and ever. God. It gets to me because I wore glasses at school in the 90s and 00s—before it was cool. I was ‘nerdy’, but did I go out into the world and create something nobody can see or touch that will eventually destroy society (and, therefore, the nasty bullies) as we know it? No. Did I fuck. I practiced and practiced until I got good at football, and I got on with my life. If Elon Musk had learned how to do keepy-uppies, the world would be a better place.

I wanted to find out how AI is getting its ethereal little robot claws into our beautiful game, so I tracked down a (sorry, mate) nerd to find out. Ollie Bennett is an expert on artificial intelligence in football—he’s got a PhD in Artificial Intelligence in Sports, specialising in predictive modelling and game theory. He’s six feet tall and far more handsome than me, which is annoying—the nerds are evolving. I asked him if AI is currently being used in British football. Yes, was his answer. In fact, he provided me with a very formal list of all the ways it’s currently being implemented.

1. Player Performance Analysis

That freaks me out for a start. This is basically those tiredness bars you see on FIFA games or Football Manager but in real life. Imagine if the telly companies get their fingers into it… You could be watching a match on TV and know exactly how much juice Joelinton’s got left in the tank (loads, always). I don’t like that. Joelinton’s juice should be his business and no one else’s.

2. Injury Prevention and Recovery

If this is being used in the Premier League right now, explain Callum Wilson to me. Andrew 1–0 Machines FC. Although, apparently, Liverpool use this, and they only have one injured player currently—Joe Gomez—and he’s due back in a few weeks. That, regrettably, is probably an equaliser for the machines.

3. Tactical Analysis and Match Preparation

The tactical analysis I get, although that’s literally what scouts do already, so there’s a human job lost straight off the bat. But the weather? I’m intrigued. You’ve charmed me. Are Liverpool shite in the rain? Could the Premier League be won with artificial cloud-seeding like what they did in Beijing to make sure it didn’t rain on the 2008 Olympics?