A Brief History of Robofoot
You will not be surprised to learn that Robofoot descended from football. Decades before Thinkbot turned up out of the blue, a robot development company, as a marketing gimmick, challenged the winners of the Europa Champions League to play a team of their robots. And thus the first ever human-robot football match took place in Barcelona amidst much laughter, loud music and fireworks:
Newcastle United 34 v 0 Robodev (6 red cards).
The match then took place every year until, ten years later, all smiles were finally and permanently wiped from human faces:
Bayern Munich 0 v 18 Robodev
(Abandoned at half time due to embarrassment coupled with Germanic disbelief.)
This left the sport of football in tatters. The robots were superbly skilled, and could play spectacular football for 90 minutes in every game. But nobody wanted to watch two teams of robots play each other as it was all rather passionless; the robots did not care a jot if they won or lost and all the hugging and kissing and jumping on top of each other after a goal took place amongst the overweight engineers in the dugout - truly a ghastly sight to anyone who beheld it. On the other hand, pure human football seemed so dull; the players seemed leaded-legged and got tired as the game dragged on. Answer? Robofoot. Robofoot teams comprise 6 humans and 5 robots, with the human players allowed to be substituted in and out of the game from a squad of 15 players as many times as they like. The robot player specification is strictly controlled and they aren’t allowed to score, or be in goal. So the ultimate excitement in front of goal is all human, the robots objective is simply to give their human strikers scoring opportunities or protect their goalie. This often leads to wonderfully comic moments where the robots play out a mesmerising move only for some overpaid donkey to hoof it over the bar from 2 metres out. To add to the unpredictability the referees are still human, although their job has been made a lot easier by technology. For example the game now uses intelligent balls that sense the last player to touch it and change colour to indicate which side should have a throw in, or whether it is a goal kick or a corner. When a goal is scored the Footbots let off fireworks out of the top of their heads adding to the overall spectacle.
This all works rather well and the game soon displaced regular all-human football as the #1 spectator sport in Europa. A few diehard clubs carried on with all-human football until this was hi-jacked by the Go Natural (anti-robot) World Cup movement, which pretty much killed it off once and for all as it was immediately dubbed ‘flower power football’.