Back in 1997, artificial intelligence and robotics experts in Japan came up with an intriguing challenge. Could anyone, they asked, build a humanoid football team capable of beating the World Cup winners by the middle of the 21st century? It sounded more than a little out there. In truth, it still does. Yet when it comes to forecasting the future of sport, it serves as a useful lodestar. Before we know it the outlandish will become the new normal.
Why am I so confident? Well, over the past few days I’ve been speaking to experts about how sport may look in 2050. And given that I recently wrote about how accurate – or not – predictions made at the dawn of the millennium turned out to be, I felt it was only fair to put my money where my mouth is too.
