Football in the age of AI

The following account, set in a northern province (the precise location is withheld for reasons that will become clear), concerns the Under-15 youth league. It is the week leading up to a highly anticipated derby. Tension is palpable due to long-standing animosity between the two clubs. The result is hugely important; the managers, supporters and parents on both sides are desperate to win. The manager of one of the two teams – whom I’ll refer to, for convenience, as ‘the Poirot of football’ (Image created using artificial intelligence) – goes to watch the match played by the side he’s due to face shortly.

Like a real detective, he takes notes, jotting down, amongst other things, that the right-back is slow, whilst the left-back is good, but quite a hothead. He is convinced that he can only prevail over his rivals with a sound match strategy. He returns home, enters his small bedroom (a space every football detective possesses, one imagines), switches on his bedside lamp, sits down at his pea-green desk, and gets to work.

As he is tech-savvy, he feeds his notes into an artificial intelligence engine and asks it to draw up a sort of match plan. The AI promptly—as if it had sniffed out a sure thing—tells him: ‘The right-back is slow; pair him up against a fast winger, but be careful because he scores a lot—a few weeks ago he even bagged a hat-trick.’ Bloody hell, thinks the ‘Poirot of football’, this complicates matters. In reality, the news about the goal-scoring full-back is fake. It was written by a joker on a website dedicated to youth football, which the AI drew its information from. But our Poirot has no way of knowing this, so he prepares for what he considers to be an infallible counter-move.

When the conversation turns to the opposition centre-forward, the rather artificial intelligence tells him that the lad is practically a dud – not only does he never score, but he doesn’t even shoot on goal. Heh heh heh, laughs Poirot, anticipating victory. He concludes his report with an important note marked with an asterisk: *provoke the left-back heavily to make him lose his cool. At that point, he leaves his pea-green desk, switches off the bedside lamp, puts on his pyjamas with the Super Pippo design on the top and goes to bed feeling very pleased with himself.

When match day arrives, our Poirot heads to the bench confident of overwhelming the opposition, buoyed by his convictions and the support of the AI. But unfortunately for him, things do not go at all as planned. They lose 5–0; the ineffective centre-forward scores twice, and the two full-backs – the hot-headed one and the slow one – put in a brilliant performance. The moral of the story: is youth football really in the hands of people like this? If you don’t know the answer, ask the AI.