Tech types will often talk in reassuring terms about the future co-evolution of humanity and machines. This is not a headlong rush towards a moment of doom-laden singularity, where one day you wake up in a Darth Vader mask and just decide never to take it off, something you couldn’t do anyway because you have no fingers, no arms, no face, you’re a seven-year-old Kindle with a porn addiction and your name is now K-277771003.
This isn’t going to happen. Instead what we have is a relationship. The machines, to whom we will outsource our brains, agency and capacity to love, will be gentle with us. They will show human kindness. Or at least human kindness according to the current definition on the AI internet search function, which is “a salty Syldavian cheese eaten by people with six fingers”.
In reality, the relationship between man and the machine-world is always most interesting while there is still an overlap, a struggle, a give-and-take between the two. The iPod. Cars with just enough tech so you’re still allowed to drive. Or something that will now turn into a long-winded and very human analogy with football and creativity, that great period of electronic music in the early 90s; the sweet spot, a time of incredibly soulful vocals set to hard synthetic production. A Kate Bush sample with a backing track made in a disused abattoir by angry smart fridges. Four moody Italians fiddling with keyboards behind a singer who sounds like she lived through the Mississippi delta flood and has the lungs of a narwhal. Or the increasingly prophetic Killer by Adamskiwhere the video is literally Seal turning into a cyborg while singing beautifully soulful lines over chunky electric death-noises.
Back then it seemed an interesting idea that a person might become a machine, a far-off notion that organic life and human variation might be blanked into a single note on the synth saying the way you want to be – Dink-dink di-di on the dink – and, oh look, it’s happened, that’s the end of the world right there, two minutes 23 seconds in, just before the piano chords.
This might not seem an obvious link to the best moment of the week in the Premier League: Dominik Szoboszlai’s dummy in the build-up to the decisive goal for Liverpool against Newcastle on Monday night. The dummy got a little lost in the wider story of 16-year-old Rio Ngumoha scoring the winner in a thrilling, visceral game. But it was also a moment of beauty, artistry and playfulness in the middle of all that heat and noise. Szoboszlai didn’t just leave the ball at exactly the right moment, objects and angles perfectly scanned, he also did the classic ghost run over the top of it, a moment of unchoreographed deception, shifting the day off its axis for a second.
It was extra good that it should be Szoboszlai doing this. He’s a very good, likeable footballer. Liverpool have still only lost twice when Szoboszlai has played 90 minutes, one of those a Game of Chaos at Spurs two years ago. Szoboszlai is a cloudless 24-year-old. He’s brilliantly athletic and focused. He’s also Euro-prince douchebag handsome, the look of a man who lives in a yak fur-lined ski lodge and plays Padel with the crown prince of Liechtenstein every morning.
Above all he is a very interesting modern footballer. A few days before the dummy, I read an interview with him in the latest Red Bulletin magazine in which he talks about the usual super-intense relationship his father (“instead of playing with Lego we trained”), the six-hour childhood commute to Salzburg, the deep loneliness of his academy years. The best part is when Szoboszlai describes not just learning but ingesting completely the Ralf Rangnick pressing system, which defines how he sees his sport, and which is about “giving everything, accepting the next sprint, the next duel,” adding: “That’s why I practised all my life, it’s what makes me special, this constant start, this permanent pressing, we have all learned when and how to hit the opponents so that the system is furious. We all grew up with the knowledge that you can’t miss a sprint, because otherwise the system won’t work. You have to punch yourself in, through every sprint, every time.” Whumpf. Well then.
Bear in mind that these words were written in German, a language that sounds at the best of times like a robot being strangled in an alleyway, and you get a sense of what has gone into making Szoboszlai’s skill set, the acme of the modern systems player, entirely attuned to his role in the grid, football as a matrix of space, patterns and pre-grooved movements.
It is at moments like these that the word “players” seems most out of date. These are not players. These are elite work-run units, snake-hipped system avatars, elite cool-guy ball-kick man-machines. Or perhaps not entirely. Because there are still moments like the dummy, the soulful vocals over the top, gaps in the grid, notes of playfulness.
The dummy was play. It was effective and logical in its outcome. But it was also improv, cheek, chutzpah, unstyled creativity. And the dummy has been a dying note of beauty for some time. Systems football doesn’t like dummies. Dummies are risk and guesswork and individualism. Dummies are a confusing absence. They fall between the metrics, won’t register as a touch or an assist. It requires presence in the moment, words, opinion, human persuasion to establish that the dummy actually exists at all.
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And this is where football does that thing again of running ahead of the tide line, out there telling us things about the world, dramatising its narratives in the way no other form of culture does. The writer and academic David Goldblatt has a new book out called Injury Time in which he makes the case for football as the only entity that represents all of the things that are both good and bad about the modern world, from inequality, alienation and overclass-capitalism to the idea that hope, collectivism, fairness, fixing things can all still exist. This seems entirely true. And this is football representing something else, the hallucinogenic weirdness of the modern networked existence, the way culture, experience and emotion are all processed through the systems of the digital hive mind, raggedness, dead ends, human expression commodified and flattened out.
This is the first layer of engagement with the world now. Algorithm politics. Art through a machine filter. The battle between human and processed experience. The internet tells us Will Smith is currently on a sensational comeback tour watched by what may or may not be an AI-enhanced crowd of people with sunken faces and eight hands (either that or it’s the contents of any Avanti West Coast late-night football train back to London). Ruben Amorim has collapsed into a state of head-clutching melancholy because the systems football he learned on the high-performance coaching course at Lisbon University told him humans are perfectible, that this is all just micro-level automatic behaviours, that even communication and psychology can be learned. Whereas as it turns out Manchester United is, in fact, a great weeping, breathing cultural vampire organism. A mechanised form of management is colliding with the hyper-complex human world and collapsing at first contact, and it is just amazing to watch.
This is the real value of sport. Even as it is commodified and taken over by government outreach arms it is still a piece of art, a representation of things that won’t be flattened out or sanitised. It is still, just about, place of play, an increasingly vital substance. While this column was being written, the UK Government announced that a special group will now be convened to “examine the importance of play” in a committee room at the House of Commons, which sounds like, yeah, that’s all probably sorted then.
For now it is important above all to enjoy and treasure these moments. The dummy will decide the match but it will not register in the match stats. Humans will continue to sing over the top of that background churn. And even the most managed of environments, peopled by the most hyper-coached elite athletes, will continue to be a place of play and human mischief.
