Are footballers artists or accountants?

The singularity is coming. And it could bring about an apocalypse of all we hold dear: football.

It doesn't seem impossible that at some point in the relatively near future*, we'll be able to say with a lot of certainty exactly what football players should have done in any circumstance. And because, when there's money on the line, people can be taught to do incredible things, we might get football players who will know how to respond in any given situation.

*Get Goalside's speculative fiction tends to find its way into reality a few years down the line; so by 'near future' let's say 2032.

This is how it could go: possession value models are reliable down to the slight changes of body orientation and acceleration, model features are tuned to the players' actual error bars, sums get run to draw up how often player X will face situations Y and Z in a match: the player duly rehearses variations of these in the simulator. Formula One drivers are now routinely within tenths of a second of each other across laps that last 70-90 seconds, a margin as small as the Max Verstappen fan club's British division; squint and a footballer's path of travel during a match is a series of lightly undulating laps.

Obviously, this would be awful. Or is it obvious? The bubbling rise of artificial intelligence is forcing a lot of questions about what the role of this or that in society is: teaching, art, friendship, copyright - the good things in life. Is a footballer's role anything more than simply providing the optimal on-ball value (OBV)

Out in the real world, Rosalía's LUX has been released to rave reviews - an album that features 13 languages, influenced by flamenco and hagiographies. There isn't a standard path to either making a work like that, or, more pertinently, to making artists who make work like that.

That said, every artist who threads the needle of artistic and commercial success has, yes, an adventurous artistic spirit, but also a sense of public appetite. They're not so crass as to use $$$ as a metric, but it's not like their art is experimentation for experimentation's sake. So, we don't need to say "oh, footballers aren't artists, they want to win", because 'art' and 'external success' can clearly co-exist.

One could argue that LUX will be a fantastic money-spinner, and that inventive players like Lionel Messi are fantastically OBValuable. But the choice of approach changes a number of things.

For one, the way you go about developing artists and developing accountants is different (even if 'creative accounting' is incredibly lucrative in itself).

And then there is the 'product' that fans tune in to see. A lesser man would say something dismissive here about 'football isn't chess', but chess isn't chess. Perfection in chess has been accomplished and, in a way, rejected: computers started beating grandmasters in the '80s, but people don't follow chessbots playing chessbots - they follow people.

Some reading this might be thinking 'nobody truly thinks that data and machine learning will fully replace human thought'. That's naïve. There are coaches who think their decision-making on the sidelines is better than the players on the pitch; there will inevitably be those who think the same about PitchControlGPT, when it comes along.

Maybe the notion of 'correct decisions', and even of 'better decisions', is wrong; a paved road for autocrats. When we talk about artists, we tend to talk about 'taste' instead, even though there are decisions which are pretty inarguably better than others (a notion even baked into western music terminology - a melody can be 'resolved', chords can be 'major' (triumphant, positive) or 'minor').

'Taste' points towards better decisions, while being a little less conceptually narrow than grading decisions quantitatively. Would it look different to coach a player towards better decisions versus coaching them to develop 'taste'?

And what does it look like, as a fan, to see a team aiming for 'better decisions' compared to one striving for 'good taste'?

Based on the reactions to the Premier League's set-piece focus this season, I think we know the answer to that one, at least.