From pigeons to AI: How football is changing

Written by Chris Williams, head of communications at Solihull Moors Football Club

The Press Box at a football match is a very strange place to watch a game, full of rituals, rules and different people desperately seeking different angles on the same subject.

There are reporters, commentators and the ever-growing Club Media, formerly one person, but now anything up to 12.

They design social media graphics, they follow the game on each of the club’s channels and platforms, they import images from the photographers pitch side and, if you are lucky, there will be one person writing the match report.

When I started covering football matches, the match report was the most crucial part of a journalist’s day.

I was ‘new media’. writing a report to be published on the final whistle. The old school journalists hated me. They preferred to muse and contemplate a little, maybe file the report an hour later after giving it careful consideration over a pint. I ruined that with my urgency.

Then some one invented twitter and instead of a report on the final whistle, you could update people as the game went along. This was a new media revolution and soon the images being used, and animated ‘Goal GIFs became all important.

The match report became almost irrelevant. So much so that I began to muck about, knowing that nobody was reading it. I spent a whole season adding a different song title from semi-legendary Indie band The Wedding Present into the match reports on an official cub website.

One game I used the first letters of each paragraph in the Boxing Day report to spell out ‘SANTA IS DEAD’. Nobody minded. Nobody noticed

One day, alongside the reporters and commentators, we began to see the Data Capturers appear in press boxes. Ever wondered where the BBC website is getting stats for possession, shots on target and goal updates from? It’s from the same place as SKY, PA and all the betting sites for whom data is king.

In every press box these days a minimum of three data capturers will sit with their phones and register activity. They have colour coded buttons to press, like a footballing bar till. “5 blue, 10 yard pass to 7. Left foot shot, just wide. Goal kick, headed by red 9 in centre circle”.

That pure data is circulated and websites can follow the action without being anywhere near the ground itself.

This sits badly with me. I write to entertain the readers, while (vaguely)reflecting the action of the game. But I am a dinosaur, trapped with my little dinosaur arms behind a coffee-stained formica table inside the stadium while AI takes my job away.

Read this paragraph carefully:

“Solihull Moors moved up to third in the table on Saturday when a Jamey Osborne goal earned them a 1-0 win over Forest Green Rovers. Captain Osborne, Moors’ longest serving player, scored the only goal of the game with a right-footed effort from 25 yards after 62 minutes. Forest Green, who drop to fifth, had won their previous seven games but defeat will mean they need to bounce back when they play York next weekend while Moors travel to Southend looking to keep their good run going.”

It’s enough, right? It has everything you need to follow the story of the game. That’s modern football. Look again. It is AI generated. Just stats and facts collated from the stat feed and data. No expenses or match fee for the writer, just easy to digest content for a modern world.

Most local newspapers are now using similar technology to generate stories, driven by an algorithm designed to generate clicks. ‘Frank Lampard’s Coventry’ is labelled that way to maximise hits.

I lecture in content creation to youngsters. They are all scared that AI will mean no jobs when thy finish their media course. I think differently. Whatever age you may be, embrace the coming technology. If you can be the one who truly understands it then how valuable are you going to become?

You know those press box characters I told you about? One of my first games was at the Vetch Field, the former home of Swansea City.

There was an aged retainer from the local paper in the corner who eyed me suspiciously when I plugged my laptop into a phone line. “When I started” he said “I used to tie a message to the leg of a pigeon when there was a goal and it would fly home to the office so they could do the evening edition.”

There really wasn’t much call for that in 2001. Embrace the new, readers, don’t get pigeon-holed…