AI’ll Be Back

A LinkedIn post the other day complained that every post on the platform sounded as if it had been written by a bot. By the time I’d read it fully, it sounded like it had been written by a bot.

The point being, it’s becoming quite difficult to tell the difference between what is real and what’s not these days.

Be it a trailer for Titanic II, or a 68-year old who now looks 23, AI is getting increasingly good at blurring the lines between truth and fiction.

My first experience of AI and football colliding didn’t exactly inspire confidence either.

It was in 2024 and someone had asked ChatGPT for the nickname of Crystal Palace FC. The right answer was, of course, the Eagles, but this is actually a relatively new thing; the nickname was only introduced in 1973, by their flamboyant manager, Malcolm Allison.

But, as is AI’s want, it hadn’t stopped there. Before 1973, it went on to say, they were known as The Glaziers. This was, the tool opined, because they were made of glass.

To be fair, they’d just beaten Brighton comfortably, and at The Amex too, by breaking remarkably easily, so maybe it wasn’t as far off as it first sounded.

A couple of years later, things have improved dramatically. And the rapid growth of AI has now given is – drum roll, please – the first football kit to be designed using AI. Apparently.

Actually, the natty Manchester City third shirt is quite lovely. It’s creator, City fan Elliott (no surname was given which now makes me suspect he’s AI-generated too, despite the photo or maybe because of the photo), has done a grand job in generating the perfect prompt and the final version is probably better than anything Puma have designed for the club on their own.

This concept isn’t new in itself either. Fans have been involved in football kit designs for years. More than seventy-five years, in fact. The most famous example is after the 1950 World Cup. Brazil had, until then, worn an all-white kit but as the host nation, they endured one of their worst moments in their illustrious history whilst wearing it.

Needing only a draw in the final game of a final group (no knock-out stages in this one) to claim the trophy for the first time, they let a lead slip and lost to Uruguay in the Maracana. The kit was the first casualty, with Brazilians concerned it was cursed because it bore no resemblance to the national flag.

A competition to design a new team kit was opened, and won by 18-year-old, Aldyr Garcia Schlee, out of some 400 entries. The Correrio da Manhã newspaper in Rio ran the contest with the main rule being that the winner would contain the colours yellow, green, blue and white.

Schlee’s design, pretty much exactly as he’d envisaged, debuted in the 1954 qualifiers and Brazil went on to wear it in that World Cup, the 1958 one they won, and again in the successful 1962 campaign. The new kit was clearly a keeper.  AI did not play any part, although I did get most of the information above by using it.

But AI has become a huge part of our lives now. Life in general for that matter. If the bubble bursts, there are even warnings that it will trigger an economic meltdown comparable with the financial crash of 2008.

Our lives will then be made worse because a thing we didn’t ask for, or even know we needed, suddenly stops being as useful as we didn’t think it would be. Go figure.

Like it’ll ever stop being useful anyway. For a start, AI is way too clever for that. It’ll know – and long before we do – that the end is coming and begin taking counter-measures to prevent its demise. If it hasn’t already. Have you not seen Terminator 2?

But before it takes control of us all, and the nuclear codes, there’s still a fair bit of runway for it to prove useful in football. And maybe not so useful.

To save on my thinking time, I asked AI exactly what it could do. It said, in short – ish, no answer is ever short – that it could do everything. And that was just the beginning. Suffice to say, AI felt it had all of the bases covered, with matters both on the field and off it.

 Here’s my edited summary, although I might also have added a couple of my own.  

1 Scouting

Remember the bit in Moneyball where all the Oakland A’s baseball scouts are sitting around in a room smoking and drinking coffee while criticising any suggestion that’s made by someone other than them? That will become a thing of the past. In an AI future, scouts of the human variety are almost certainly toast.

Pros: The future stars are chosen using a more scientific approach that might see things currently missed by the naked eye.

Cons: Lots if you’re a scout. Or coffee and / or cigarettes.

2 Coaching

AI can plan out whole sessions and the drills within them. Coaches no longer need to lose sleep worrying about this the night before. AI has it covered, and says it can even give players feedback on where they are going wrong.

Pros: No more awkward coach:player conversations.

Cons: If every club does it, won’t they all play the same way? They already are? OK, move on.

3 Business Administration

Now it’s moving its influence from the pitches to the offices. Just about any task can be done, or made easier, using AI. Operations, marketing, commercial; the sky is the limit. Taken to a logical conclusion, a club could eventually become a loose association of people who ar there to feed AI.

Pros: Som clubs might actually stop losing money .

Cons: Cons? AI runs the whole club. What could possibly go wrong?

4 Intelligence

I tried this boast out in the real world. On my request, AI made lots of suggestions for the kind of merchandise that Grimsby Town fans might want to buy in the club store. It did not mention Harry the Haddock once, yet in a real-life fan survey I did two years ago, he was one of the key take-aways (that sounds awful – for Harry at least - when I put like that).

Pros: The club doesn’t order things that fans don’t want

Cons: The club doesn’t order things that fans do want

5 Fan Engagement

As the younger generations of fans spend about 93% of their day looking at a screen, perhaps AI is the logical way forward when it comes to engaging them. The danger is knowing how far to go. What is the threshold for the truth? What could start off with it suggesting the best part of the stadium for a family, could end up with AI recommending other leisure pursuits they could do that represent better value for money.

Pros: AI could tell fans all about what they could find at a club.

Cons: AI could tell fans all about what they could find at a club.

6 Managing the team

If it’s doing everything else off it, focus will inevitably fall onto what is happening on the pitch during matches. Managers will shake their heads dismissively and say ‘it’s never played the game.’ AI will shak whatever it shaks, and say you don’t need to have been a horse to be a great jockey.

Pros: If 99.9% of people in England could see that Thomas Tuchel didn’t need more defenders in the semi-final, so – presumably – could AI. It’s galling to think that England’s chances in the World Cup could have been so much better with CoPilot on board.

Cons: The media will have no further need for character assassinations.

7 Income Generation

All clubs want more money, don’t they? Struggling clubs want anything they can get their hands on, but even the mega-rich aren’t immune to haggling to save or raise a few quid.

Pros: As almost all avenues have already been exhausted, maybe AI can help to identify and unlock a few new ways for a club to monetise someone or something.

Cons: Chelsea are already investigating if they can sell the AI part of the club. Probably.

So, plenty for football club employees at all levels to fret about.

But, AI insisted, there was a much bigger opportunity than just letting it do all the tasks that a club currently employs human beings to do.  

It could be so much more. Don’t think of AI as a tool to help football clubs, it suggests, but think of it as a layer that sits on top of everything that a club does.

 Which is, I’m pretty sure, the thinking that led to it all starting to go downhill at Skynet, the unknowing computer system that was introduced in Terminator as something that would eliminate human error (oh, the irony) and make the world safer and better, only to end up destroying it.

Before they needed to send people from the future to kill someone in the present, the system simply took over. Humans had given it enough leverage to eek control from their hands for long enough to lock them out of the equation going forward.

Think VAR; realising that fans were so fed up with it that the governing bodies were planning to get rid. So it begins controlling the refs remotely (that should have been Mike Dean’s excuse) and making all future decisions on its own. Imagine that, before anyone could react, it had already changed the handball law again and cancelled all of Pierluigi Collina’s press conferences.

That’s almost exactly what Skynet did. We give someone or something a little bit of power, leave them unchecked for a while and that power corrupts, until they become virtually unstoppable.

And how do you stop something that you can’t even see, and didn’t even know was your enemy?

Simple answer. You can’t. But that’s years away. Right now, AI is still very much in the useful phase.

So, would you like me to create a new list of all the other things AI can do in football?

Or if you tell me what your role is, I’ll compile a list of all the things it can help you with.

That’s what will really make the difference. It’s not just giving you a sense of what might happen in the world.

It’s shaping your future.

That’s real.

Would you like me to create an action plan for you?