The recent 2006 FIFA World Cup Final in Berlin brought football fans to one place. Millions of people leaned over their televisions and watched the FIFA World Cup being played in Germany. They looked at the style and follicular weaknesses of Zidane, Ronaldo, Beckham, Rooney and many others. They came to see Zidane’s header against Marco Matterazzi and to see the emotions of the players.

But, the one you see in 2050 will not be similar to this one. Artificial intelligence researchers are trying to build fully autonomous robots to take on World Cup champions, as Robocop 2006 showed. They’re not as agile as their human counterparts, but they can score a goal or two. They are quite clumsy when it comes to tackling opponents and are barely aware of what a foul is. They also don’t have many followers because they don’t have technical finesse to show off. They don’t have any kind of style or follicular weaknesses to appeal to football fans. They only have tech buffs as their supporters who believe that these high tech players are slowly making big strides to challenge the true champions of the game of football by the end of 2050, kind of like Computer Deep Thought taking on the grandmasters of chess like Gary Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand.

While people all over the world were busy impressing the art of Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham, these humanoids or robots had a field day fighting for the 2006 Robocup in Bremen, Germany. The 10th Annual Football for Robots Championship held at the Bremen Exhibition Center from June 14-20 featured 440 teams from 36 countries, including the US, China, Japan, Portugal and France. While the FIFA World Cup eliminated one victorious team, the Robocup had 33 winners. 11 of them were German teams. Although there were no headers or players ripping off their jerseys after a win, there were definitely some of the other trappings in the game: blocked shots, penalty cards, to name just two.

So, indeed, human teams must have more practice and skills to defeat AI robots in Home-Robocup 2050. Otherwise, it might be after 2050 that we take robots as our own heroes. There could be a Robo-Zidane and a Robo-Beckham who would then be the icons of football. Well, if you’re a spectator at the 2050 Homo-Robo Cup, you might find yourself sitting in the stadium with other robotic fans cheering on their own robot teams.