What if the 2018 World Cup was the last?

…at least the last one so publicized. This edition of #Mondial2018 breaks records in many areas such as the amount of operating rights, audiences or even the number of bets, it is therefore legitimate to ask the question of the sustainability of this development. Are we going to continue this growth or are we in the presence of a bubble phenomenon?

We are not the first to raise the possibility of a speculative bubble around professional football, the question even comes up quite automatically each time a new symbolic bar is crossed; transfer of Neymar for more than €200M, Ligue 1 TV rights for more than €1B etc. It's easy to play the prophet on this subject when nature proves us right; no inflationary phenomenon can grow infinitely. The real question is to know what critical size can the footballing sphere reach, and when would the implosion occur? This article does not contain the answer. We are neither economists nor clairvoyants, on the other hand we work on a daily basis to try to understand what the football of tomorrow will look like, and it will undoubtedly not resemble the one towards which the historical media would like to take it.

Football can be described as a creature halfway between a game and a spectacle. The World Cup, as we experience it, would be the hypertrophy of the second part. To analyze it, it is therefore appropriate to draw parallels with other shows; let’s take cinema and music.

These two areas have been disrupted in recent years by the arrival of Youtube, which allows the spotlighting of artists from the people and who literally steal the show from the old stars. Here again, much more competent sociologists than us have attempted to explain the phenomenon, but one mechanism deserves attention; each generation needs to have its own icons, which resemble it and belong to it. So it doesn't matter if Norman is more or less talented than Gérard Depardieu, as long as every millennial identifies with him. The same pattern applies to the music industry, we let you choose the artists. Coming back to football, well Depardieu is Neymar, the huge old-fashioned star. Ask yourself the question, passionate reader of football, of everything that brings you closer to the Brazilian, and you will understand that we can do better in terms of “representation”. What the football industry is doing is continuing to finance big productions without taking into account that the public now wants another show. Some would say that young people want story-telling . Football, according to their definition.

I laughed the day when, a little less than 10 years ago, a friend suggested that, rather than watching a Champions League match, I watch the Playstation simulate it via the FIFA video game. Today, tens of thousands of people watch games every day, particularly via the Twitch platform. Enough to already make some Ligue 1 clubs jealous. But we don't see any competition between football as we know it and its video game version, since they both belong to a large family; Games. Their success is therefore intrinsically correlated to the pleasure they provide to their players. However, the video game industry is pulling out all the stops to create tailor-made experiences for players that are ever more fun and addictive. Why wouldn't we do the same for the grass version? Well that's what we do at Footbar , we try to create a new experience around our favorite sport, adapted to the needs of our generation, and using the best of current technologies.

The first step was to design a technical solution to evaluate player performance. For a video game it's simple, we play against an artificial intelligence which tells us if we were good or bad. In the case of football, we mostly play with our friends, and it is collective intelligence that decides whether we deserve a golden ball or a lead ball. We therefore had to train artificial intelligence to reproduce this judgment. To this end, we equipped players with a sensor on the calf, the Meteor, and recorded thousands of hours of matches, particularly in 5-a-side football centers. Our AI was quickly able to recognize simple gestures, such as a run, a pass, a strike, etc., and we continue to train her on a daily basis, with the ambition that she can quickly evaluate the player's complete performance as well as Pierre Ménès. From then on, everyone will be able to publicly demonstrate their talent and obtain recognition from their peers, all over the world. The new generation now has the tool that will allow them to create their own icon, and it might be you. Go to your nearest 5-a-side football center and ask for your Meteor sensor!