Hey, Grok – remove the actual footballers and create an AI game between Arsenal and Liverpool next time | OneFootball

Here’s a thought about the brave new world of football awaiting us as 2026 begins: if you enjoyed Arsenal v Liverpool, or perhaps especially if you found it ridiculous that they so remunerate such mediocre entertainment and call it elite, it might be one of the final few times the match is actually played between humans.

Think it unlikely? Yeah, that’s what they said about self-checkouts, the flying shuttle and the power loom.

We already know that a large cohort of football fans acquire much of their football knowledge and entertainment from computer games and use it in Fantasy Football. In other words, they derive pleasure from football while not watching any real football. So how long will it be before clubs realise they could get rid of the players and managers along with their exorbitant costs and replace them with a digital AI representation?

Would people be just as happy? I bet a larger percentage than you’d imagine would be happy enough with a simulacrum of football; indeed they already are. Plenty already believe Chat GPT would have picked a better team than Ruben Amorim.

In fact real football is often much less interesting than FIFA or Championship Manager. If you’re waiting on a score to complete your acca, does it matter if the result is AI generated? You know it doesn’t. By removing the power of wealth in the virtual world, wouldn’t it be more competitive and less predictable? Especially as AI begins to educate itself from what it’s created?

If Kelly, Gabby or Chappers were talking about what had happened in the digital simulation this weekend, would it be any less entertaining? Do humans invest it with significance beyond a digital representation? No, not really.

I already talk to and respond to Gemini and take its advice on everything from health to cooking and music history. In other words I treat it as a real person.

We’d soon get used to it and it would become normal. After all, transfer news and speculation is now also one of the most popular features in every media outlet. Insatiable and thus persistent, it could easily be reproduced by a virtual AI programme. If the transfers only existed virtually, it wouldn’t bother the people who crave this as some sort of entertainment. Why would it? It’s all abstract anyway, involving sums of money that are hard to conceive of as realistic.

So much of the architecture of football’s economics feels ludicrous and made up. This is already the stuff of fantasy not reality. Does it have to be flesh and blood to matter? I’m not so in love with humanity to think it does. In fact, removing the insane level of remuneration would be quite refreshing. At least it would if it didn’t go into the pockets of murderous and greedy capitalist portfolios instead.

And if the money-obsessed goblins, who are everywhere on all sides of football, learn there are greater profits by the clubs conducting their business virtually, do you really think they wouldn’t do it? A subscription to see what AI has created would be interesting and at least as entertaining as with real people. What’s the difference? Life as one big game of FIFA is more attractive and closer than we might think.

The random elements that we all love about football are easily built into an AI simulation initially as it self-educates. AI is colonising most aspects of life at a rapid rate; what are your arguments that football is immune to this trend? I can’t see there are any.

If you think fans are important to clubs then just cast your mind back to Covid times when clubs played without fans and only on TV. Did they play worse or celebrate a goal less? No. It was effectively a dry run for a time when football dispenses with the actual football. It’s not played for us anymore. Only our money matters.

Elite football, if it was supported by media and fans by some sort of levy and subscription, would cease to be manifested by humans and only lower league and amateur games would actually be played, if only because they couldn’t afford the AI-powered system that will be launched by FIFA.

We’d have a two-tiered system where the AI league would be seen as the clean and sophisticated version of football and the physical manifestation was for the anachronistic luddites.

There is precedent in the same way mines became museums, the seed drill replaced a man broadcasting seed and the Gutenberg press replaced all those scribes who wrote out books. Time moves on. Realities you thought were set in stone turn out to be just a temporary phase. Society is undergoing profound change as every role except manual jobs that can’t be done by AI are farmed out to various algorithms. It’s already happening. The future is here. There’s an AI-created advert on TV, even as I write.

Imagine a website entirely written by AI that talked about football? It’d be a fraction of the cost to make and almost certainly as engaging and so much cheaper. It will also work 24/7.

You can see the attraction. And if you think it won’t happen, look how life has changed in the last 30 years. Our lives now so shaped by the internet in a way we couldn’t have conceived in the late 70s when I was doing A levels. No one ever imagined the game would be refereed by VAR and if for a moment they did, they’d have assumed technology had made it infallible and it wasn’t so stupid as to be like your dad looking at a telly.

I don’t see football escaping the AI revolution. Why would it be an exception? We’ve already been marketed into buying the Premier League as a superior concept and in doing so given validation to the league’s notion that ‘they’ll buy anything’, as long as it’s ceaselessly promoted as the best football has to offer, even despite clear evidence to the contrary. Who’s to say they won’t repeat the process with AI? And this time it would probably be at least as good as the real thing.

If they do, would you really mind? You could still watch lower-league football but the Premier and Champions League would just have the same variability built into the AI and offer the same predictability as it does now. You could still get excited by a new signing. They just wouldn’t really exist or cost any real money.

There’d be no actual crowds watching games, but no costs of producing games, maintaining and insuring a stadium, no paying stewards, catering staff, training and managerial team and above all no playing staff, which is 50-90% of every clubs’ costs. There’d be no injuries or tiredness nor paying players a million a month when they’re hurt and can’t even play.

We’re halfway there, with the EFL already a different game to the top flight thanks to the economics and VAR. So much about football has nothing to do with the actual kicky kicky being played by sweating humans, especially the higher you go up the pyramid.

You think it won’t happen? The profit-hungry money execs already run the game and dictate much of football’s culture. They’ve already taken over. If you can make more money by doing away with players but offering a better level of excitement, why wouldn’t you?

It won’t happen overnight but we’re already being inculcated to accept it from how betting is sold to us, to the nature of how the game is presented to us. Not for no reason does my missus often say ‘that looks like a computer game’ when football is on TV.