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We got AI to imagine Chelsea’s future stadium... and wound up rather worried by the results.
Based on how Chelsea have fared under their current owners over the past few years, nobody necessarily expects things to get done very quickly or efficiently around Stamford Bridge - but still, the news that Todd Boehly thinks that the club could be stuck waiting for a new stadium all the way into the 2040s suggests that some improvements are going to take a very long time indeed.
Apparently, Boehly and his co-owners at Chelsea see building a new stadium (or renovating the existing one) as a long-term project that could take them 20 years – which would be 2042, based on when they bought the club in the first place.
What will a typical Premier League stadium even look like by then? What technology will have emerged to change the match day experience? Well, we decided to find out… by lazily asking AI to come up with a new stadium design for us.
Given that AI is largely used for doing homework badly and ruining the usefulness of Google searches, we aren’t expecting much… but perhaps the algorithm can offer us some insight into the future of football support, and the horrors that await us in a future that doesn’t seem to get much brighter whenever we turn on the news? Let’s find out.
What AI thinks Chelsea’s new stadium will look like… in 2042
How Chelsea’s futuristic 2042 stadium could lookHow Chelsea’s futuristic 2042 stadium could look
How Chelsea’s futuristic 2042 stadium could look | Grok
Considering that AI is fundamentally a machine programmed to destroy the journalism industry and replace it with something far, far worse, we’re not in a rush to give it too much credit for anything – but the image it’s generated of a futuristic Stamford Bridge 2.0 is, admittedly, rather pretty.
Described egotistically as a “futuristic masterpiece” by its robotic creator, the new ground is supposedly surrounded by “a shimmering, kinetic facade composed of translucent, photovoltaic nano-panels” - whatever those are.
Apparently, that Star Trek technology allows the stadium to pulse with colours based on the noise of the crowd: “During a quiet moment, the facade glows a soft blue; when the crowd roars, it pulses with vibrant hues of sapphire and gold, visible across London’s skyline. These panels generate 60% of the stadium’s energy, supplemented by micro-wind turbines embedded in the roof’s undulating, wave-like structure, inspired by the River Thames.”
Which all sounds lovely, although we do wonder if the nod to concerns over climate change will be relevant given that London may well be a small desert by the time the stadium gets built. Saving a few trees’ worth of carbon could feel a bit previous come 2042.
On a side note… why does everything in sports have to be “inspired” by something these days? Why does there have to be a marketing justification for aesthetic choices? MK Dons’ new logo was allegedly “inspired” by the city’s allegedly ‘iconic’ roundabouts, as though the club’s board were afraid to say “we thought the round logo looked nicer”. Similarly, our fictional stadium is already pretty. No need for some spiel about the Thames. AI imitating life, here.
Anyway, there’s a lot of other stuff which all sounds nice and appealing. 80,000 seats, retracting roof, futuristic hybrid turf and so on. But that’s not what we really found interesting. Oh no… it’s what AI reckons the match day experience of the 2040s will look like that caught our attention…
What AI thinks going to a game will be like in 20 years’ time
The ground itself looks all smart and space-age, but it’s what happens inside that will really change, according to the machines – and frankly, we don’t like the sound of the future one little bit.
For starters, in many regards the ground will be run by a “sentient” AI called BlueMind which will not only determine whether to open or close the roof and “optimise crowd flow” but also get involved in just about everything the fans do.
When this BlueMind offers to “curate personalised fan experiences”, it apparently means everything from delivering snacks to your seat by drone to suggesting apposite chants and withering comments that can be made to opposition supporters – the AI model we used even comes up with an example: “Remember when we won the Champions League… twice?”
Aside from confirming to us that AI lacks even the slightest degree of wit, this also suggests that Chelsea won’t have won the Champions League again in 17 years’ time (believable enough, on their current trajectory) – but doesn’t it all feel just a little bit sinister?
Sinister in the sense that when asked to predict the future of football, AI has itself running stadiums and even telling us fans what to say and when. Is this current AI preparing us for a future of machine-led thought control? It feels a little Matrix-esque, doesn’t it? And what exactly did it mean by a “sentient” AI?
It’s not like humans need computers to prompt us when it’s time to note that opposing fans are sneaking out, or to tell the referee that he has some specific personal habits that don’t bear repeating here. We have chanting down to an art form already. It’s concerning that the machines reckon they know better.
Or maybe it just means that AI can see a future in which ‘ordinary’ match-going fans are an anachronistic irrelevance, replaced entirely by wealthy tourists and day-trippers paying far more for a ticket – and who indeed need to be given instructions as to the precise order of noises one should make as the goalkeeper runs up to take a goal kick. Either way, it’s all a bit bleak, isn’t it?
Mercifully, based on how bad it is at hashing out a quick essay without a slew of factual errors, we aren’t too concerned about AI’s ability to predict the future. But we are, perhaps, concerned by its ambition.
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