The 2022 FIFA World Cup will soon be under way, thrilling football fans worldwide. What most of the billions of global spectators may not realize is--as with seemingly every other aspect of life--artificial intelligence (AI) is already playing a role in the sport. AI firms, including DeepMind, are working on AI playing football by training AI-driven players to become competent footballers. But as they make strides in "solving" football with AI, the lessons they learn will find myriad other applications. As this Wired piece notes, AI "could one day help robots to move around our world in more natural, more human ways."

Agent-based simulation (ABS) is a computationally demanding technique for simulating dynamic complex systems and observing "emergent" behaviour. With the use of ABS, we can explore different outcomes of phenomena where it is infeasible to conduct research testing and hypothesis formulations in real life. In the context of football we can use ABS to examine effects of different formations on match outcomes or study various play styles using millions of simulated football games. The availability of good simulation environments are critical to ABS. Fortunately, football has received a lot of attention in this field thanks to the long history of the RoboCup simulation track [itsuki1995soccer].