Not even progress calms the controversy over the alternation of championship matches. Yet since this year the League has equipped itself with an ultra-modern tool that has been successfully tested in North America.
There was a time when the ritual of compiling the championship calendar was, literally, something for scribes. Then came the period of the computer, more and more intrusive because it was increasingly useful for speeding up the work of the managers of the Lega Serie A and to begin to keep together the growing requests which were transformed into limits to be taken into consideration starting from the growing weight of TV rights and the demands of broadcasters.
Now there is really nothing left of craftsmanship and humanity in the creation of the Serie A seasonal calendar. The top Italian football competition has long aligned itself with best practicess of the rest of the world of professional sport and since last June, therefore this season, it has made the final leap by embracing AI and choosing to rely on those who write the calendars of the main North American professional leagues for a living: NBA (1,230 games between regular season and playoffs), NHL (1,344), MLB (even 2,430).
Compared to these sacred monsters that move tens of billions of euros in turnover and are under the eye of fans from all over the world, the 380 challenges that make up the Serie A championship must seem like a joke for the company’s algorithms and AI Fastbreak AI with which the Lega Calcio Serie A announced that it had entered into a multi-year partnership aimed – we read in the press release – “aimed at the adoption of an advanced platform for the structuring and optimization of the calendars of the competitions organized by the League”.
Therefore, the human aspect is extremely limited and it could not be otherwise given that the compilation of the calendars must consider not only the normal progress of the competition, each team plays 19 games at home and 19 away, but also limits that safeguard their integrity, protect as much as possible the clubs that also face the UEFA competition season and take into account the requests of the clubs themselves and the dictates of Municipalities, Coni, law enforcement and all those who revolve around the complex machine organization of professional football.
This is why arguing with the Serie A calendar has now become a sterile and anti-historical exercise. A bit like taking it out on the fact that the matches are no longer played all at the same time on Sunday afternoon. To AI and algorithms Fastbreak AI Hundreds of indications have been given to be respected to avoid embarrassing overlaps, for example, for the management of public order or congestion of events within the same municipality or a delimited territory. Or, again, to meet the needs of clubs that need to complete the modernization work on their facility.
Artificial intelligence does everything. Then the Lega Calcio Serie A manages during the season the positioning of advances and postponements in the slots of the stew which can now be ten out of ten single matches. And here comes the needs of the broadcasters and what involves the auction with which the image and broadcast rights were sold to DAZN and Sky: some of the matches, especially the most important ones, were “chosen” as picks and, therefore, must end up where their value is greatest for those who purchased them by spending a total of 900 million euros.
