We are scared of artificial intelligence. What if an explosion of fake news will destroy democracy, what if the children of the future will have more digital friends than real ones, what if it will burden millions of jobs, including those of TV series writers.
Well, I have good news. Football will not be loaded. Because? Because it’s not only live theater, it’s totally unpredictable, like all human life. Artificial intelligence is based on information acquired – inevitably – in the past. A football match exists in the raging present. The results depend on the mood and talent and luck of eleven unprogrammable specimens of Homo sapiens.
No matter how hard they try – as with the odds predictions they make on TV after 15 minutes of a match kicking off – no machine will ever be able to predict what will happen 90 minutes from now in the real world. 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 Premier League TV rights offers guarantees that the most expensive series will never provide.
Let’s look at the season that just ended. Let’s see the intensity and variety of emotions it has generated, from ecstasy to agony, through romanticism, comedy and tragedy.
Okay, it’s true that artificial intelligence could have predicted that Manchester City would win the Premier League; that Paris Saint-Germain, the Ligue; than Bayern Munich, the Bundesliga. But the way each of these leagues came to a conclusion gave us episodes that were impossible to imagine.
Pep Guardiola is the architect of City’s fifth Premier League title in six seasons. He’s the closest football has to a super robot inventor. But this season the robots lost home and away to Brentford, a club naturally accustomed to the third division. And in January City were eight points behind earthly Arsenal, victims in the end not so much of Guardiola’s science as of the fear of winning, a sentence that Rafa Nadal once gave me and which serves as a good example of the enigma indecipherable of human life.
Despite having Messi and Mbappé, and with more money than all the rest of the teams in the French league, PSG were crowned champions very narrowly, almost caught 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 win at home to ninth-placed Mainz 05. This is tragedy. The images of the local players lying on the grass when the match ended recalled the stage full of corpses at the end of Hamlet, but the pain they shared with the fans was not invented; he was flesh and blood.
Comedy abounds, but I would highlight the case of Chelsea, another European giant of recent years, who spent more on new players in January than the leagues in France, Spain, Germany and Italy combined, but came twelfth in the Premier, behind Fulham and Crystal Palace. A good comedy was also given to us by Cristiano Ronaldo, the highest paid player on the planet, whose Al-Nassr is second in the Saudi league, and he is second in goals in the team. His big triumph came in February, when he was crowned player of the month. Cristiano must not have understood it, and neither did the AI, but the photo in which he celebrates it makes you laugh, a reaction that Messi can expect every month of the year if next season he chooses to be a neighbor and rival of the vailet Portuguese in Riyadh.
For those looking for romance in football, few things beat the feat of Lilliputian Brighton, who finished sixth in the Premier League and will play in Europe next season for the first time in their history. The only club that perhaps surpasses it, that mixes romanticism with doses of comedy and tragedy, is Barcelona, ​​which at the beginning of the season neither artificial nor divine intelligence would have judged capable of conquering the Spanish championship.
