“There is more in heaven and on earth, Horace, than what your philosophy dictates.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
We are terrified of this artificial intelligence thing. What if an explosion of fake news will destroy democracy, if the children of the future will have more digital friends than real ones, if it will destroy millions of jobs, including those of television series writers.
Well, I have good news. It will not end football. Because? Because it is not only live theater, it is totally unpredictable, like all human life. Artificial intelligence is based on information acquired – inevitably – in the past. A soccer match exists in the rabid present. The results depend on the state of mind and the talent and luck of eleven unprogrammable specimens of homo sapiens.
No matter how hard they try – as with those probabilities of results that they give you on television 15 minutes after the start of a game – no machine will ever be able to anticipate what is going to happen in the world in 90 minutes. real. Bookmakers will continue to make money from football and TV channel owners will be able to continue betting on football as the most reliable source of income there is. Investing in the Premier League television rights offers guarantees that the most expensive series will ever provide.
Let’s look at the season that just ended. Let’s see the intensity and variety of emotions she has generated, from ecstasy to agony, through romance, comedy and tragedy.
Ok, it is true that artificial intelligence could have anticipated that Manchester City would win the Premier; that Paris Saint-Germain, Ligue 1; than Bayern Munich, the Bundesliga. But the way in which each of these leagues reached its outcome gave us episodes that were impossible to have imagined.
Pep Guardiola is the architect of City’s fifth Premier in six seasons. He is the closest football has to an inventor of super robots. But the robots lost home and away this season against Brentford, a club whose natural habitat is the third division. And in January, City were eight points behind earthly Arsenal, a victim in the end not so much of Guardiolista science as of their fear of winning, a phrase that Rafa Nadal once gave me and that serves as a good example of the indecipherable enigma of the human life.
Despite having Messi and Mbappé, and with more money than all the other teams in the French league, PSG were narrowly crowned champions, almost overtaken by a team known at home as RC Lens. As for Bayern, they won their eleventh consecutive title on the last day of the Bundesliga thanks to Borussia Dortmund’s inability to convert a penalty and beat Mainz 05 at home, ninth in the table. That is tragedy. The images of the home players lying on the pitch at the end of the match were reminiscent of the corpse-strewn stage at the end of Hamlet, only the pain they shared with their fans was not made up; he was blood, flesh and blood.
There is plenty of comedy, but I would highlight the case of Chelsea, another European great of recent years, which spent more on new players in January than the French, Spanish, German and Italian leagues combined, but finished twelfth in the Premier, for behind Fulham and Crystal Palace. Good comedy also gave us Cristiano Ronaldo, the highest paid player on the planet, whose Al-Nassr is second in the Saudi league, and he second in goals in his own team. His big win came in February when he was crowned player of the month. Cristiano will not have understood it, nor will the AI ​​either, but the photo in which he celebrates it is laughable, a reaction that Messi can expect every month of the year in the event that he chooses the season that he is coming to be a neighbor and rival in Riad of the Portuguese sapling.
For those looking for romance in football, little beats the feat of Lilliputian Brighton, who finished sixth in the Premier and will play in Europe next season for the first time in its history. The only club that perhaps does surpass it, mixing romance with a dose of comedy and tragedy, is Barcelona, ​​which at the beginning of the season neither artificial intelligence nor divine intelligence would have judged capable of winning the Spanish championship.
