Will technology really be a game-changer – or is it in danger of changing the games?
May 8, 2024
David Granger, content marketing consultant pens down whether technology will really be a game-changer – or is it in danger of changing the games?
This year we will get a fresh dose of new technology to help spectators, athletes and officials get even more out of sporting contests. But are we in danger of over-complicating our competitions?
In the film Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character Dr Ian Malcolm (the gifted mathematician whose specialism is – fantastically – chaos theory) questions the wisdom behind cloning creatures which the world has done without for millions of years. His oft quoted line could be applied to tech in sport as much as extracting insects from amber:
“Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
2024 is going to be an amazing year for sport. From the Euros to the Paris Olympics, from the T20 World Cup to the winter youth Olympics… this is going to be packed.
The calendar also coincides with a massive upshift in the amount of tech available to fans, federations and athletes. It’s near impossible to open your browser without the letters A and I being forced down your retina.
But (like Dr Malcom queried), is its application all for the betterment of the sport and its spectators? The slew of press releases and reports which have appeared outlining how AI will increase fan engagement, democratise selection and improve objective rulings need to be tempered with a dose of interrogation.
If VAR in football is anything to go by (and hey, Nottingham Forest and Sweden will back me up on this), then machine assistance hasn’t eliminated the problem of, for example, potential refereeing mistakes. If anything, it has exacerbated those heated arguments and stopped the flow of the game. Far from bringing in solutions, it has brought in more problems for the spectators, the teams and the referees.
None of this has deterred the International Olympic Committee from embracing AI with open arms for this year’s games. Not only are they welcoming innovations to spot upcoming talent (using mobile phone footage to democratise the selection of the next generation of athletes), they’re colorising old games’ footage and assisting the scoring of the diving contest.
With no small and I assume no intended irony AI was called by the IOC at its Olympic AI Agenda launch in London last month a “gamechanger”. Talk to half the football fans in the UK and changing the game is the antithesis of what they would like technology to do.
But for the IOC, it’s important to not simply watch the bandwagon speed on by but jump on it now. As IOC President Thomas Bach said in London: “We have to be leaders of change, and not the object of change.” Which was echoed by Yiannis Exarchos, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) chief executive: “The concerns fans have is very legitimate. I am a huge believer in the possibilities of technology but precisely because I understand how technology can be wrong, I think we all need to be vigilant. We need to go to trusted sources to get our information.”
And it’s not just on the track or field where AI will be assisting the rule of law in Paris. Technology using AI to monitor ‘abnormal’ behaviour was trialled at a Depeche Mode concert (insert your own Master and Servant punchline here) and will be used during the Games. How? Well, “algorithms”, according to Reuters have been trained to detect “abnormal behaviour” such as crowd surges, fire or weapons and send alerts to humans… who work out if the alert warrants any action.
So there are definite gains to be had, even if there will be some interesting civil liberty test cases if it all goes a bit Big Brother.
No one can argue that protecting athletes from online abuse using AI should only be applauded. But, and this is where the discussion of utilising AI in sport needs to be more nuanced and differentiate between sport and the business of sport, we need to ensure benefits are not necessarily measured by new and exciting shiny technology, but practical benefits. And that means not changing the actual game/s themselves.