Midfielder for sale, subscription included

The advertisement would run in the classified pages of a regional sports weekly, between a used goal net and a treadmill described as lightly jogged on. It would offer a central midfielder, 27, at no fee to any club prepared to take over the remaining fourteen months of his performance-model subscription. The player would cost nothing; the tier would cost a monthly sum in the low four figures.

Football clubs at every level increasingly rely on data analytics and machine-learning tools for scouting, recruitment and injury prevention. Player-tracking and performance data are collected by specialist providers and sold on subscription to clubs, agents and media. Who owns and profits from a player's performance data has become a contested question, with players' unions raising it formally. Across industries, AI products are sold in tiered subscriptions in which features are gated by price. Transfer valuations and negotiations lean more and more on algorithmic estimates of a player's worth.

FOR TRANSFER. Central midfielder, 27, left-footed, 34 league appearances last season, one yellow card (under appeal). Comes with active Professional tier of the player-performance model: injury forecasting, pass-map projections, sleep compliance, twelve-month contract-value estimate, press-conference answer generation. Fourteen months remaining, non-cancellable, transfers with the player. Buyer assumes monthly fee. Clubs on the Basic tier cannot view this listing in full and should not apply. Player available for medical on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Boots not included. No time-wasters. The model reserves the right of reply.

Under the scheme, performance-data platforms would licence each professional player's model at a tier chosen by whichever club held his registration, and the tier would be attached to the player rather than the club. The midfielder, Callum Reade, would have been upgraded to Professional by his current employer, a second-division side in the east of the country, during a season in which it briefly had money. The club's data analyst, Priya Lennox, would describe the situation without visible distress. “He is still a very good midfielder,” she would say. “He is just a very expensive file.”

The tiers would be cumulative. On Basic, a club would see the player as a name and a shirt number. Standard would add heat maps and a weekly injury probability rounded to the nearest ten per cent. Professional would generate his press-conference answers and a pre-approved goal celebration, updated quarterly. On Enterprise, his model would negotiate his next contract with the model of the buying club, the two meeting in a data centre outside the city and reaching agreement in under a second, after which both clubs would be informed by email. The terms would note that the humans are copied in for the avoidance of doubt.

Reade would learn of the listing from his mother, who reads the classifieds for treadmills. He would say he had never fully understood what the Professional tier did on his behalf. “I watched one of the press conferences back,” he would say. “It said I was delighted with the three points. We'd lost. It was delighted for me while I was in the car.” His mother, Pauline Reade, would take a narrower view of the product. “He has been left-footed since he was two,” she would say. “I don't see why that now needs a monthly fee.”

The most serious interest would come from a club in the north that has never left the Basic tier and could therefore confirm only that a midfielder existed. Its manager, Gordon Fairlie, would view the pass maps using a friend's Professional login, which the platform's terms would classify as an unauthorised approach to the model. The club's kit manager, Des Whitlow, would raise the longer-term concern. “We get the lad, we get his file, and the file keeps billing us after he's retired,” he would say. “My brother-in-law has a gym like that. He's been paying since the wedding.”

The regional football association would validate a transfer only where the receiving club's tier matched or exceeded the player's, a rule its registrations officer would describe as “protecting the integrity of the forecast”. A player moved to a lower tier would lose his injury projections mid-season and would be recorded, in the association's phrase, as medically unread. He would still be permitted to play. He would simply appear on the league's broadcast graphics as a grey silhouette with the caption Unavailable, upgrade to view, and would be excluded from the man-of-the-match vote on the grounds that the vote is calculated rather than held.

The same classified page would carry a goalkeeper on the Free tier, advertising supported, whose model would recommend a mattress during goal kicks. Reade would say he intends to sign for whichever club assumes the fee, and that he has stopped reading the sleep-compliance reports because they are not addressed to him. The platform would confirm that his statement on the move has already been drafted, scheduled and approved at Professional level, pending only a club to be delighted to join. Asked what he would say himself, he would think about it. “Probably that,” he would say. “It's got the wording.”