In 2020, Liverpool won their first Premier League title in 30 years, after being crowned kings of Europe just the previous season. While sport pundits worldwide credited their success to a great generation of players led by the likes of Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah, they were also united in pointing out the pivotal role that Jürgen Klopp and Ian Graham (the head of their data analytics team) had on reshaping Liverpool’s philosophy of playing football and club management. With Liverpool recently partnering with tech companies like Acronis and SkillCorner, Klopp is now in the forefront of the future of football coaching, one which seems to rely heavily on data analytics and Artificial Intelligence. In light of these new developments, Serguei Beloussov, the CEO of Acronis, has even said that AI powered robots might make human football managers and coaches obsolete. The aim of my talk is threefold. I will first provide a short overview of how football clubs like Liverpool have been using AI powered data analytics in the past couple of years. Relevant decisions both on and off the pitch, which up until recently were within the purview of powerful managers of the likes of Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger, are now outsourced toward AI powered data analytics algorithms. Such decisions range from transfer options to tactical decisions implemented even during an ongoing game (Schoenfeld 2019; Tuyls et al. 2021; McLean et al. 2022). I will then show why this shift in the nature of coaching in football, while transformative, is unlikely to lead to any serious job displacement for the likes of Klopp and why a virtue ethics framework is the most adequate in helping us understand this. Even if AI-powered robo-coaches could master long-term and short-term planning, they will be unable to exercise satisfactory levels of the other two core coaching skills and abilities put forward by Standal and Hemmestad (2010): administrative leadership and psychological insight, alongside accountability. Firstly, robo-coaches would be unable to pass the Aristotelian inspired Moral Responsibility Test (Constantinescu et al. 2022) and thus fail to qualify as morally responsible agents. Furthermore, since coaching decisions have moral implications, such a job requires not only technê, but also phronêsis. Last but not least, since robo-coaches lack a moral character, they will not have the moral (and psychological) skills necessary to be mentors to their players and thus generate the necessary trust for player development. Last but not least, my presentation will end with a discussion of the use of AI in football coaching within the larger debate regarding the future of meaningful work and automation. If “pursuing a purpose, social relationships, exercising skills and self-development, self-esteem and recognition, and autonomy” (Smids, Nyholm & Berkers 2020) are important, then one of the questions I will be trying to formulate an answer to is to what extent Jürgen Klopp’s job at Liverpool can be described as being more meaningful in comparison to his stint at Borussia Dortmund a decade ago—one in which data analytics was not employed. One tentative answer is that, far from being a threat, human—AI cooperation of this sort actually enhances the prerequisites for meaningful football coaching, at least in the case of individuals with a higher degree of emotional intelligence (Lichtenthaler 2020).

You’ll Never Coach Alone: AI, Virtue Ethics, and the Future of Meaningful Work in Football

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发表日期：

2026年

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Radu Uszkai

摘要

In 2020, Liverpool won their first Premier League title in 30 years, after being crowned kings of Europe just the previous season. While sport pundits worldwide credited their success to a great generation of players led by the likes of Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah, they were also united in pointing out the pivotal role that Jürgen Klopp and Ian Graham (the head of their data analytics team) had on reshaping Liverpool’s philosophy of playing football and club management. With Liverpool recently partnering with tech companies like Acronis and SkillCorner, Klopp is now in the forefront of the future of football coaching, one which seems to rely heavily on data analytics and Artificial Intelligence. In light of these new developments, Serguei Beloussov, the CEO of Acronis, has even said that AI powered robots might make human football managers and coaches obsolete. The aim of my talk is threefold. I will first provide a short overview of how football clubs like Liverpool have been using AI powered data analytics in the past couple of years. Relevant decisions both on and off the pitch, which up until recently were within the purview of powerful managers of the likes of Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger, are now outsourced toward AI powered data analytics algorithms. Such decisions range from transfer options to tactical decisions implemented even during an ongoing game (Schoenfeld 2019; Tuyls et al. 2021; McLean et al. 2022). I will then show why this shift in the nature of coaching in football, while transformative, is unlikely to lead to any serious job displacement for the likes of Klopp and why a virtue ethics framework is the most adequate in helping us understand this. Even if AI-powered robo-coaches could master long-term and short-term planning, they will be unable to exercise satisfactory levels of the other two core coaching skills and abilities put forward by Standal and Hemmestad (2010): administrative leadership and psychological insight, alongside accountability. Firstly, robo-coaches would be unable to pass the Aristotelian inspired Moral Responsibility Test (Constantinescu et al. 2022) and thus fail to qualify as morally responsible agents. Furthermore, since coaching decisions have moral implications, such a job requires not only technê, but also phronêsis. Last but not least, since robo-coaches lack a moral character, they will not have the moral (and psychological) skills necessary to be mentors to their players and thus generate the necessary trust for player development. Last but not least, my presentation will end with a discussion of the use of AI in football coaching within the larger debate regarding the future of meaningful work and automation. If “pursuing a purpose, social relationships, exercising skills and self-development, self-esteem and recognition, and autonomy” (Smids, Nyholm & Berkers 2020) are important, then one of the questions I will be trying to formulate an answer to is to what extent Jürgen Klopp’s job at Liverpool can be described as being more meaningful in comparison to his stint at Borussia Dortmund a decade ago—one in which data analytics was not employed. One tentative answer is that, far from being a threat, human—AI cooperation of this sort actually enhances the prerequisites for meaningful football coaching, at least in the case of individuals with a higher degree of emotional intelligence (Lichtenthaler 2020).