Former AFL player Cale Hooker has turned to the world of ‘virtual sports’ in post-footy career leading an AI football revolution
Once a dependable defender for the Bombers, Cale Hooker has taken an unlikely left-turn into sports business via an AI-driven virtual global soccer league, writes SHANNON GILL.
Dependable and pragmatic, former Essendon defender Cale Hooker was good enough to be an All Australian defender in 2014.
Yet he certainly wasn’t the proto-Gen-Z Jack Ginnivan, “look at me” type personality of the league.`
Which makes what he’s doing now a little gobsmacking.
The salt of the earth AFL player is, with One Future Sports founder Peter Davis, a mastermind of a computer-driven virtual global soccer league headquartered in a laneway in Melbourne.
Their One Future Football League is where watching a game comes a distant second to the stories and AI-generated personalities around it.
“When you’re playing all you think (is it’s) all about winning and performing,” Hooker tells CODE Sports.
“But then once you’re out of it, you see it’s almost more about everything else around it, entertainment, engaging with fans, stories. It really is entertainment in a way, so it’s a whole new appreciation.”
If you’re scratching your head, you’ll need to suspend your belief before you take in Davis’ explanation.
“It’s based on the premise that younger fans aren’t engaging with pro sport as we once did, they’d rather play video games, they’d rather do things that are participative, where they’re influencing things,” Davis says.
“They definitely aren’t used to sitting down and watching sport and not touching the iPad or the phone or whatever else.”
“So it’s an engagement tool for younger fans.”
Virtual players are created with a set of on field and off field attributes then fed into the computer engine which creates results on the field, and stories off it.
You can see virtual highlights, scores and reports, but the main content comes from the narratives around it.
Fans can interact directly with the virtual players and help them work on their skills that move the algorithms for the next game.
“You pick a player that really appeals, perhaps because of their social views, and that player will chat with you,” Davis says.
“They’ll talk about how their tackling was awful on the weekend, so you can choose to train them up in those areas to improve them.”
Off the field each player has a distinct personality which endears them, or otherwise, to fans.
The official Team of the Season for Season 3 of #OneFutureFootball 📣
— One Future Football (@1FFOfficial) August 29, 2024
Brasil Amazônia (4), South London United (2), Paris St-Denis (2), Bondi FC (2) and Riyadh Stars (1) are all represented.
Do you agree? Who missed out? Post in the replies. #football#teamoftheseasonpic.twitter.com/PSnkyIURLC
Some are passionate supporters of charity causes, some are full-blown Trump acolytes – reflecting the real world and motivating fans to love or loathe them.
“Tennis without Nick Kyrgios is a lot less interesting than tennis with Nick Kyrgios,” says Davis. ”
“So rather than being completely reliant on the serendipity of the perfect athlete turning up at the
perfect time, what if we could use all the modern technology to create athletes?”
“But you can’t just create a footballer with Lionel Messi’s left foot and David Beckham’s right foot. You need to tell the story of how they grew up in a gritty part of South London and they were in trouble when they were young.”
Mid-season holidays are fed into the engine where player personalities may lead to a teammate fracas or too much fun in an Ibiza nightclub that further fuel the narrative.
“It’s not going to be a Marcus Bontempelli-type who is going to punch his teammate,” Davis says.
“The engine will lean into who they are and what their temperament is, so another type of player might end up doing that.”
There’s even AI-generated journalist characters, One Future Football’s version of Mark Robinson or Buzz Rothfield is ‘Fabio Rossi’, interrogating the issues with players,
In some ways it’s a computer generated sporting soap opera with similarities to the WWE, yet in just 12 months it’s been good enough to gain 250,000 Tik Tok followers.
The faux-journo Rossi has 33,000 followers on X.
The company makes its money by attaching brands to the league and teams – just like a ‘real’ league – or its created players. Recently they signed a $10,000 boot deal for one of their virtual players.
This week Davis spoke at the Australian Sport Tech Conference about how this new technology could be used by sports and rights holders to engage younger audiences in their product.
Indeed Davis and Hooker are working on versions for different sports which has aroused the interest of major sporting bodies looking to provide alternative content that they can monetise or build fans through.
Land one of those and One Future Sports could progress beyond being a speculative start-up into a player in world sport.
Hooker has bought into Davis’ original vision as an investor but also plays a hands-on role in engaging global sports stars as ambassador ‘owners’ of each franchise.
All up there are 26 sports stars that are associated with a franchise, from grand slam winner Naomi Osaka to former Manchester United star Patrice Evra.
The Australian team, Bondi Football Club, is owned by the diverse group of Nick Kyrgios, Steve Smith and Hooker’s former Essendon teammates Zach Merrett, Sam Draper and Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti.
Hooker’s experience as a professional sportsperson means he’s the one that deals with owners and it’s resulted in some pinch me moments with global stars.
“We’ve got (UFC star) Kamaru Usman who’s a team owner of Nigeria (Naija United) and he’s designing the team kits,” he says.
“We’ve had Patrice tell us he flies around following the matches, so it’s been cool to see that.”
And while involvement in the start-up has given him a very different perspective outside the AFL bubble, Hooker says there’s one thing that remains the same with athletes, even in the virtual world.
“With the ambassadors that own the teams, if the teams are winning, they’re much more happy to put themselves out there and talk about it.
“But if they’re down the bottom, they’re emailing us ‘what’s going on with the team?!’”
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