Could AI come up with some snazzier kits for V.League 1 clubs? Photo courtesy of Việt Nam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF)

by Peter Cowan

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a couple of months, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Text generators like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, image generators like Midjourney and sound generators like Murf AI have entered the public consciousness in a big way recently.

But I have yet to see much discussion of what AI could do for Vietnamese football, so I thought it would be fun to speculate.

Schedule making

At the highest level, the likes of the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga use a “fixture computer” to determine the best way to organise a season.

I’m not sure exactly how the V.League 1 fixture list is devised but based on the nonsensical choices we’ve seen in recent years, I’m willing to bet it’s not a high-tech process.

ChatGPT could be given a bunch of relevant parameters and spit out a fixture list in a matter of seconds.

Perhaps we could even tell the AI to come up with a schedule that doesn’t involve pausing the league for months at a time arbitrarily every year. We have the technology, we can rebuild the fixture list.

Nicer kits

I’m not the most sartorially inclined person, but even I can see that a lot of Vietnamese sides don’t have particularly appealing kits.

We could use AI image generators to come up with some funkier designs that would really catch the eye.

Nam Định FC, for example, play in a particular boring all yellow kit which is a real shame considering how rabid their fans are.

Wouldn’t it be great to see thousands of fans at Thiên Trường Stadium decked out in Bladerunner inspire neon yellow kits? Or maybe that’s just me.

Legal arbitration

Let’s face it, V.League 1 teams end up in legal disputes pretty regularly.

Whether it’s the likes of Thanh Hóa failing to pay their foreign players, or Hoàng Anh Gia Lai’s fall out with the league itself over their sponsor, it always feels like there’s a new legal battle around the corner.

ChatGPT was infamously used by a Colombian judge to help him write a ruling, but I think we can go a little bit further here in Việt Nam.

Of course when a case reaches the Vietnamese court system we shouldn’t use AI, but often these disputes first go to football governing bodies to rule on.

Wouldn’t it save time and money, if both sides in a dispute simply made their argument to an AI judge powered by ChatGPT?

If the AI judge-bot was programmed to be quite harsh this might even encourage clubs to stop getting into these pickles. VNS