AI is going to change football.

In many ways, it already is.

Clubs are investing in it across performance, recruitment, analysis and their wider business operations. Reading Football Club have gone as far as appointing a Head of AI. That direction of travel isn’t going to reverse.

Nor should it.

I was probably a relatively late adopter of AI tools myself. But over the last couple of years, I have invested a huge amount of time in understanding how they can improve the way I work.

I’ve spoken to leaders at football clubs who are doing the same. I’ve seen some of the thinking around how AI could be used both on and off the pitch, and I genuinely believe the opportunity is enormous.

So this isn’t an argument against using AI.

Quite the opposite.

It’s an argument for using it properly.

Because when it comes to football media and communications, I think there should be one fairly simple test:

Your supporters shouldn’t know you’re using it.

Anyone who has spent time working in football communications will understand that a football club develops its own voice.

It isn’t simply a tone-of-voice document sitting somewhere on a shared drive.

It comes from the history of the club, its supporters, its location, its personalities, its humour and hundreds of interactions that have happened over many years.

If you’re passionate about working for that club, you become immersed in it remarkably quickly.

You begin to understand instinctively how the club speaks.

How it announces a new signing.

How it talks after a defeat.

When humour works and when it absolutely doesn’t.

How supporters are likely to react to something before you’ve even pressed publish.

A comprehensive brand guide can help enormously, but ultimately you have to feel it.

Football is different from most businesses in this respect.

Supporters haven’t just bought a product.

Many have invested decades of their lives in the organisation. They’ve spent their money, travelled thousands of miles, celebrated, argued, complained and built friendships around it.

The emotional investment is enormous.

That means even relatively small changes in the way their club communicates can be surprisingly noticeable.

Change the voice overnight and they will hear it.

We’re reaching a point where people are becoming increasingly good at recognising completely AI-generated content.

There is often a particular rhythm to it.

The same sentence structures. The same language. The same slightly generic enthusiasm. The same polished but strangely characterless way of explaining something.

None of those things necessarily mean AI has been used.

But when every piece of content suddenly starts sounding completely different from everything the club has produced previously, people notice.

And when supporters start commenting publicly that articles are clearly being generated by ChatGPT or another AI platform, you’ve got a problem.

Not because using AI is embarrassing.

It isn’t.

The danger is what supporters might conclude from it.

They might think you couldn’t be bothered.

That their communication wasn’t important enough for somebody at their football club to sit down, think about what needed saying and write it properly.

In most industries, that may simply be irritating.

In football, it can become a significant PR problem very quickly.

For a young person beginning a career in football media, AI should be an unbelievable tool.

Use it.

Let it review your work.

Ask it to challenge your headline.

Use it to help structure something if structure isn’t your strength.

Ask it whether you’ve explained something clearly.

Use it for research, ideas, proofreading and repurposing content.

If you’ve written 1,000 words and need 300 for another platform, make the technology work for you.

But don’t mistake efficiency for quality.

Putting six bullet points into an AI tool, copying the response and pressing publish isn’t really creating content.

And more importantly, you’re potentially denying yourself the opportunity to become a better communicator.

Writing gets better by writing.

Editing gets better by editing.

Judgement develops through making decisions, occasionally getting them wrong, understanding why something didn’t land and adjusting next time.

Those are skills.

If AI does all of that thinking for you from the beginning of your career, when do you develop them?

The technology should accelerate your development, not replace it.

There is another challenge particular to football.

The mood changes incredibly quickly.

Your team might have lost three matches in succession.

A popular player might have left.

Supporters might be frustrated about ticket prices.

Something the manager said two days ago may have completely changed the context around today’s announcement.

The piece of communication you would have written last Tuesday might be entirely inappropriate this Tuesday.

Could an AI platform understand all of that?

Of course.

But only if somebody has taken the time to give it that understanding, continually update the context and then use enough human judgement to recognise whether the output actually reflects what is happening around the club.

At which point we’ve returned to the important bit.

The human judgement.

AI can know your brand guidelines.

It is considerably harder for it to know the current feeling on the terrace.

It would be unfair simply to point the finger at younger media professionals.

They have entered the industry at a moment when AI is being presented as transformational, and in many ways it is.

They will naturally experiment with it.

They should.

The responsibility of those leading football media and communications teams is to help them understand where it adds value and where it can diminish it.

That might mean processes.

It might mean documentation.

It might mean establishing some simple internal rules around AI-generated content.

But more than anything, I think it comes down to effective team management.

Build a team that loves what it does.

Create an environment where people take pride in the quality of what goes out.

Give younger staff the confidence to develop their own ideas and their own writing rather than simply looking for the fastest route from information to publication.

If people are passionate about the game and passionate about the club they’re representing, they should want to produce brilliant football content.

The objective shouldn’t be to publish more things more quickly.

It should be to create the best content you possibly can with the resources available to you.

AI can absolutely help you do that.

Whenever I’ve worked with people creating content, one of the questions I’ve always come back to is incredibly simple:

Are you proud of it?

Not:

Is it done?

Not:

Has the article gone up?

Not:

Did we get something on social quickly enough?

Are you proud to put your name against what you’ve produced?

AI doesn’t change that standard.

If anything, when generating competent copy has become easier than at any point in history, quality and originality become more important.

And for somebody starting their career in football media, there’s another reason to care.

You never really know who is reading.

That match report, interview, feature or announcement might simply look like another job on today’s content schedule.

But it could also be the piece somebody at another club sees.

It could be the article a future employer remembers.

It could demonstrate that you understand football, understand supporters and know how to communicate.

Those opportunities have existed for generations of young sports journalists and media professionals.

Don’t allow AI to write them away for the sake of saving ten minutes.

Embrace the technology.

Learn it.

Experiment with it.

Make it part of your workflow.

Use AI to make yourself a better communicator and to help demonstrate the passion that brought you into football in the first place.

Just don’t let it become your voice.

Because your football club already has one.

And your supporters know exactly what it sounds like.