Nowadays, players are no more than numbers or financial assets from the clubs’ viewpoint. Decisions in the realm of ‘Footballnomics’ will no longer only be assigned to the anthropopathic willpower of scouts, club owners, general managers, or even to coaches. From theory to practice, in the current state of the legis artis applicable to the field AI-based Football Analytics and decision-making processes in the employment context, Portuguese lawmakers once again have highlighted their propensity to pursue by inaction technophobic (lay)gorithmics of normative nature. Thus, in matters of Football Analytics at the scale of ML modelling, the Data Protection Law is not yet prius, nor posterius, it is not given, nor the solution, it is not in the beginning, nor in the end. It simply does not exist, but it should. Any player, knowing that is supervised by AI tools on the field of play - whether in training sessions or in-games environment - may tend to change behaviour, improve performances and score more goals, thereby helping out his/her teams achieve victories. In this essay, we will conclude that Data Protection Law is for AI-based Football Analytics a real stone in the shoe, which hurts because of its non-reasonability and intolerable disproportionality from the viewpoint of those who find themselves overly and negatively affected, i.e. the football clubs themselves or even the sports tech companies.

Authors:

Cesar Analide

(AI researcher at Synthetic Intelligence Lab (ISLab), ALGORITMI Centre and Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of Minho, analide@di.uminho.pt.)

Diogo Morgado Rebelo

(Fellow Trainee at Synthetic Intelligence Lab (ISLab), Department of Informatics, and Master’s Candidate on Law & Informatics, School of Law, both at the University of Minho, djmr1995@gmail.com).

Reference:

Analide, C; Morgado Rebelo, D.. (2020). "A New Power AI Play for Winners in the Employment relationship of Professional football: How Lawful is Artificial Intelligence to the Upcoming Portuguese ‘Big Data Ball’ Championship?". in Anuário E.Tec 2020 - Artificial Intelligence & Robots, JusGov, Universidade do Minho, 171-202. 

Link:

https://www.jusgov.uminho.pt/pt-pt/publicacoes/anuario-etec-2020-2/.&nb…;