Crabs, the everything app

If you're either Online or a biologist of some sort, you'll know what carcinisation is. Nature abhors a vacuum but loves to be a crab; a handful of different crustacean species all independently evolved to be more like them.

This kind of convergence on a 'good idea' happens all around us: slab touchscreen phones, caffeine, and (eventually) meatwall corners. Social media platforms that grow big enough eventually all add shopping, advertising, and 'shows'. White collar work platforms are converging on offering code, design, and documentation capabilities (Figma AI, Claude Design). Arguably, open-play football tactics converge to a mix of athletic defence and ball-respecting possession play for 'good squad' teams, and low-block defence and direct play for 'bad squad' teams.

The tech items in that list are interesting for being different versions of everythingification. Back when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he was mocked for his plan to turn it into 'X, The Everything App' – notably, it is still not an everything app, and the mocking was correct and just. But modern tech infrastructure lets technology do more and be more everything-y. Which will, one would expect, come for football tech too.

After all, a football club is one organisation, with criss-crossing of interests all over it. Data has a natural use with video for analysis; both have a natural use with marketing and social media; match data should be on the same system as training data; recruitment data could benefit from living alongside fitness and injury data of the first-team squad; training ground facilities management may as well be synced with fixture calendars and everything else logistical.

It's not like I'm saying anything ground-breaking. Teamworks is pitching itself as 'the operating system for sports, TM'. Infinite Athlete – still the closest thing to a permanent shirt sponsor that Chelsea have had since 2023 – was mocked for its plan to spend lots of money putting its logo in front of people while being oddly unclear about what they did – notably, et cetera. But 'operating system for sports, TM' does not seem far off what they should have been saying. Everythingification.

If this is to take root in football, where else might it happen? The combination of coding and design tools feels like a particularly interesting path to follow. Previously, in the tech world, the two were as separate as oil and water, Arsenal men and Spurs men. But pretty quickly, people realised that there was only so far that you could go with code-generation tools creating 'pretty' and 'good UI' by themselves. Equally, making good UI design files can be a painfully pernickety process, needing to create parallel universes of pictures for each button state: the kind of mostly-rote task that LLM-world is great at.

The thing that makes this all possible – we're coming back to football in a second – is that the design files are digital, and therefore, when you boil it down, merely representations of data structures. Match footage (and training footage for that matter) is not currently well-represented by data structures. Not to go all Silicon Valley about things, but this might be a blocker to progress.

There are a few techniques available for this. Tracking data isn't really a data structure, but it can be processed into a spec that someone creates. 'Traditional' video tagging by analysts is another means. Nowadays, the kind of event data that you get direct from data companies might even be good enough to do the job.

But what to use 'code plus designs' as a metaphor for? I think the closest thing would be to say that, in software, 'code' is what you are building, and therefore could represent the output of 'analysis'. The 'design' could be a game model, or general principles underlying the particular bit of analysis.

In the past, UI designs would be worked out and refined and then often handed off to a tech team to implement. Nowadays, powered by language models as an underlying technology, the 'process loop' between the two can be much quicker, tighter, improving both ideation and refinement. Maybe the same can be possible in football.

I don't know whether this is a good idea. I definitely don't have a TM for it. But data structures do seem to be the crabs of the digital world.