Whenever a new piece of technology or new idea hits the airwaves, I look out for the sceptics. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking for something to tell me that the whole thing is a pointless waste of time. I’m not a cynic. I just want to ensure that there is a critical view of whatever it is. Good ideas stand up better when they’ve been properly critiqued.
A few years ago it was the Metaverse, Blockchain, NFTs and Crypto that were all going to Utterly Transform Everything, but lots of the applications of these (in sport) were half-baked money making opportunities to sell virtual stickers to stick in a virtual album that it turned out could be hacked even though it was all secured on the secure Blockchain.
Over recent months I’ve been consuming more and more around the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI), listening to some interesting thoughts from Daron Acemoğlu from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (try this FT podcast), particularly his scepticism about the use of the technology, and his serious concern that investment is being misdirected in a number of key areas. I’ve also read about Robert Evans experience of tech-bros worshipping at the temple of AI, some of whom go so far as to claim that ‘….any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder’. Wow! His podcast (part of his ‘Behind the Bastards’ series is in two parts: part one and part two) on this subject is well worth a listen and is based on the Rolling Stone article.
One thing’s for sure, the investment funds are piling into AI at the moment, and there’s not much you and I can do about it at that level. Governments will, as they always do and often behind the curve, need to wade in and try to exercise some control on behalf of the rest of us. What we can do in the meantime is to be sceptics. So how about football?
You can’t make a fan happy by every interaction with a football club being an automated customer service agent. Instead you have to invest in real people having real conversations and interactions. It’s the same reason you can get rid of cash on turnstiles or people tearing a season ticket slip out of a book, but you still need staff on the gates to ensure there aren’t any hiccups.
I’ve also been reading how it’s going to transform fan engagement. Sorry, is transforming it, apparently. In breathless tones I read that the statistics used by the BBC in their coverage of Euro 2024 were truly revolutionary, transforming our understanding of the national sport, providing truly riveting insight into how many passes each player made in a match, making us want to stick around for three hours of post-match analysis of the 0-0 draw between San Marino and Malta in the UEFA Nations League. Thrilling.
The use of large amounts of data is certainly interesting for those prone to poring over statistics, but almost certainly quite a lot of hot air for most people having to do the ordinary, less revolutionary activities required in fan engagement roles in football – and I suspect sport more generally. I’m often chatting with those people whose jobs are not going to be made any better, easier or more streamlined by AI, and in fact, they are looking at how to use human contact in their work far more. One interesting ‘innovation’ if you can call it that comes from Huddersfield Town, where they run drop-in sessions at their Legends Bar and Cafe for fans to ask questions about any number of problems or issues they might have, ranging from ticketing, accessibility and, yes, even IT issues. That’s fan engagement.
I take the view that since the Covid Pandemic, two things have happened: It’s sped-up the use of technology, but it’s also made us crave human contact. During the pandemic, many in football were having serious conversations about the possibility that a lot of fans had got used to not going to football, and that their habit had been broken (me and Mark Bradley from the Fan Experience Company talked about it on Episode 33 of the Fan Engagement Pod handily titled ‘Has Covid changed matchgoing habits for good?’) Yet July 2023 saw a new peak in the top-flight, and very healthy figures in the other three tiers of English professional football.
The problem with the approach that says technology will always be a positive thing, or that we can automate everything, is that it won’t and we can’t. People still crave human contact and association, and even if we can divert or direct some customer/supporter service queries, we’ll still have someone asking a question about something a bot won’t be able to handle, or which needs a human being involved for other reasons. When like many of us you have experienced Virgin Media customer service, or the very modern problem of trying to report an obviously fake social media account to have it taken down, only to be met with ‘this hasn’t violated any of our terms and conditions’, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Until we have created this business model that will probably end up eating itself anyway, and might not actually exist (at least in the form imagined), it’s my estimation that clubs should focus on ensuring that actual human capabilities are encouraged and developed (and in fact Daron Acemoğlu wisely says could be aided with the right use of AI). You can’t make a fan happy by every interaction they have with a football club being an automated customer service agent. Instead you have to invest in real people having real conversations and interactions, and we should be investing our time – and, yes, money – in these areas. For the same reason you can get rid of cash on turnstiles or people tearing a season ticket slip out of a book, but you still need staff on the gates to ensure there aren’t any hiccups.
As Robert Evans says in his podcast on the subject, AI it could get to the point where most AI is just a parallel universe of AI generated bots generating AI memes and comments to respond to AI generated content that no human actually ever interacts with, all to drive the bottom line of a Silicon Valley tech business. What use is that to someone who just wants to know if you’ve got the home shirt in large?