Machines, Matches, and the Modern Muddle of Football

As you may have noticed, this week’s newsletter is a day late. Not only that, but it’s also a bit shorter. However, it includes something very close to my heart:

Offside by Algorithm: When Football Lost Its Right to Be Wrong

Today, I’m going to rant about a perfect blend of chaos and order, where a ball serves as both a guide and a source of human passion. Football’s genius lies not in clinical precision but in its glorious imperfections: the defender’s mistimed lunge, the striker’s offside gamble, and the referee’s split-second judgment call that has the potential to spark pub debates for decades to come. But now, as a Werder Bremen devotee who was wallowed in the unique atmosphere of the Weserstadion and organised ragtag matches where the only currency was joy, I see the soul of the game withering under fluorescent-lit efficiency.

We’re told technology is needed to sanitise this vibrant ecology. Take semi-automated offside technology (SAOT), which is making its way to the Bundesliga: Thirty cameras track 29 body points per player, while AI conjures 3D animations sniff out human error. Gone are the days when a linesman’s raised flag sparked collective gasps; now we await the verdict of skeletal tracking meshes and “kick-point” algorithms. Efficiency über alles! Using technology like this isn’t about fairness; it’s about control. When every millimetre is surveilled, spontaneity becomes a data point, and intuition becomes a bug in the system. This isn’t progress—it’s the bureaucratisation of ecstasy. Football’s magic lies in its irreducible humanity: the referee’s fallible eye, the defender’s split-second gamble, the crowd’s collective gasp as a linesman’s flag twitches. SAOT doesn’t eliminate error; it outsources it to machines whose logic is as inscrutable as a tax code. When a striker’s toenail breaches the algorithm’s invisible plane, we’re asked to accept it as “objective truth,” forgetting that offside laws are human constructs.

The same forces pushing SAOT will soon demand AI-coached tactics, algorithmically optimised substitutions, and metrics reducing Tuana Mahmoud’s artistry to an “expected goals added” spreadsheet. Football becomes a product to be streamlined, like Amazon warehouse workflows or Uber surge pricing.

Yet here’s the rub: football persists. The game's heartbeat still pulses in pickup games worldwide, in roaring stadiums chanting through relegation battles, and in free community matches where offsides are settled by laughter. Technology and capital may colonise the spectacle, but they cannot replicate the raw, sweaty alchemy of 22 humans chasing a ball and finding, however briefly, a fragment of shared purpose. The question isn’t whether football survives, but who gets to define it. Football’s origins are communal, its structure inherently unpredictable, and its meaning forged in shared experience. Will we allow it to be a sanitised product of Silicon Valley or fight to keep it a mirror-cracked, imperfect, gloriously human outcome of our collective struggle? I’ll be in the stands, shouting defiance. Join me.

Journalism’s Future: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Pray the Bot Was Sober

Axel Springer urges its journalists to make AI the starting point and standard tool for all journalistic processes. Medieninsider published excerpts of Claudius Senst’s email to staff, praising AI as the new oracle for journalism. Under the fluorescent glare of corporate optimism, the idea emerges that the sacred art of reporting—the pursuit of truth and the trust between reader and writer—should now be left to a chatbot's mechanised insights. This notion that ChatGPT and its counterparts should be the “standard for research, ideas, and quick answers” is not just naïve; it betrays journalism's core principles. Are we to believe that, in this era of algorithmic misfires, the solution to trust issues is to hand over control to a machine that confuses truth with plausible falsehoods, fabricates sources, and distorts context like your average US President? 

The newsroom, once a hub of scepticism and debate, has transformed into a service centre for AI-generated content, where the only fact-checking involves whether prompts are courteous enough for the bot. The investigative reporter, a crucial dissenting voice against power, is replaced by an autocomplete function. This leads to an avalanche of SEO-driven nonsense, indistinguishable from the propaganda it was supposed to challenge. Senst’s vision is not innovation; it is abdication. It prioritises convenience over rigour, quantity over quality, and spreadsheets over bylines. For journalism to have a future, it must resist the allure of algorithmic temptation. Otherwise, we will exchange the vital practice of truth-telling for the sterile comfort of machine-made mediocrity. If this interests you, read this report on AI’s impact on journalism—or this piece by Casey Newton.

Wikipedia as Elon Musk's Nemesis

Last week, I wrote about the recent attacks on Wikipedia by Trump’s lemmings, a fearful attempt to silence free knowledge and control the truth. That same night, Die Zeit published an excellent piece on this. Here’s my gift link to the first 10 of you who click on it. My favourite sentence: “You have to think of Wikipedia as Elon Musk's nemesis: It is the eighth largest website in the world, it cannot be bought, and it values facts.”

Thank you for reading. Looking forward to writing next week’s edition!