Exclusive: “Really interesting and fascinating” AI could forecast what Arsenal players would do against Man City



Football as we know it today is just about as far removed from the ‘working man’s’ game of old as it’s possible to be, however, technology won’t stand still and things will continue to evolve.

Twenty or so years ago, Sam Allardyce, then of Bolton, took advantage of a tool known as ProZone, where, as BBC Sport noted, he ‘used meticulous performance analysis techniques at the cutting edge of sports science.’

Depending on your point of view, Big Sam was either a genius looking to gain an advantage, or being laughed at for a reliance on ‘technology’ to do the dirty work for him.

AI will be the future of the football

At the elite level, even managing to gain a little extra over your opponent makes new ways of working worth considering, and that seems ostensibly why some of Europe’s top teams already appear to be working with AI.

Former super agent and Premier League co-creator, Jon Smith, is all for it.

“What’s going to happen in football is AI. Yes really,” he said to CaughtOffside for his exclusive column.

“It’s really interesting and fascinating, and I’m already speaking to a lot of the clubs at senior levels about this.

“Manchester City, for example, could set up Arsenal’s own tactical formation and run it through AI, where it will forecast what players will do in certain situations; ie if they go wide, if they go through the middle, if they play three across the middle, rather than four.

Sam Allardyce was well ahead of his time with the use of technology (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)

“AI runs those sequences, and you end up with a number of different circumstances which will only get more and more intricate over the years begin and as AI becomes more intelligent.

“It will have the predictability that the human mind probably can’t numerically rival. So in other words, you can come up with half a dozen plans in your head, but AI will come up with 35.

“The opinion on AI is already very valued by clubs, so we’ve got a lot of tactical change coming. It’s one of the reasons why the whole data processing of players abilities has taken on a whole new shape, and also why clubs are going for younger coaches now at the top of the game; because they understand where it’s coming from whereas the older coaches don’t.

“[…] Is it bad for the game? No. It can only, in my humble opinion, make the game more efficient in its tactical advantages and add another layer to the sport we love.”


 

Of course, this set of circumstances is hardly likely to enthuse the traditionalist.

Football as a sport has been tinkered with on far too many occasions in the past it seems, and whilst one can appreciate the advantages a state-of-the-art AI system would bring, surely seeing and monitoring things with ones own eyes remains preferable to being at the whims of machine learning.

There’s even a cogent argument that, in future, clubs won’t need as many technical staff on board, given that many of the roles undertaken could be usurped by the knowledge that AI will have.

Top photo by Boris Streubel/Bundesliga/Bundesliga Collection via Getty Images