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By Tony Attwood
It is a topic we have commented upon once or twice or maybe more times because it keeps popping up in the newspapers, as when a “supercomputer” tells us what’s really what. And not just in the universe at large but in the world in general and football in particular, as in: can a supercomputer predict football results?
Now Opta often mentions in adverts that it has access to a supercomputer, so I began to wonder where this “super computer” came from and how Opta has managed to buy time on a machine where time really is money.
Of course we know that OpenAI’s chief exec and Old Bill Gates who more or less invented the PC have talked a lot of late about artificial intelligence, and that is an issue that really does rely on super computers. But where does the Opta supercomputer fit? I mean, you can’t really pop into the local supermarket and buy off the shelf..
And yet when there is some recourse to numbers in the reporting of football we keep being told that the Opta supercomputer can predict football results – and that presumably could make us all rich.
In fact one might as well give up waiting for the football results, since the supercomputer will tell us what’s what before the weekend even begins (although AI can and does make mistakes).
But back in the summer of 2025 Opta seemed to be wanting to tell us who was going to win the Premier League. Now we know that Opta Sports is owned by Stats PErform and we can be 99.99% certain that Stats Perform does not have a super computer. There are supercomputers in the UK, including Isambard AI at the University of Bristol’s National Composites Centre, and ARCHER2 managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council .
And we are also pretty sure that Met Office has a supercomputer – a 14 PFlops meteorological system which is used for weather forecasting. Plus the military have one at the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Now that one spends its time running defense and security simulations – and for my own safety I don’t want to that to be diverted into predicted football results. So I hope it isn’t that one.
And our pals at the University of Cambridge chipped in (geddit?) with the news that there is an AI-HPC system called Dawn at the Univesrity powered by Intel Data Centre GPUs.
Now there is also DiRAC which in fact is five systems studying cosmology and the like and a National Supercomputer centre in Edinbugh. And it was this one that gave us quite an insight because we found the budget for their system was £750m a year – which seems an awful lot of money for Opta to spend on a supercomputer.
So what does Opta do? We found a statement that “Opta collects, analyzes, and packages millions of real-time sports data points (such as passes, tackles, shots, and player tracking) across over 30 sports in 70+ countries,” with its data used by the football federations and broadcasters across the world.
And it runs the Opta Analyst platform, which publishes match win probabilities. Opta talks of its “advanced tracking and AI technology” to capture “both on-ball and off-ball movements to map player fitness, space control, and tactical performance”.
That’s good stuff, but that’s not quite the same as having a super computer. So we asked AI and it said, No the “”Opta Supercomputer “is not a physical supercomputer, but rather a marketing team for a data-driven statistical AI simulation model.”
And that seemed a let down, as did the fact that this “runs on standard cloud or server infrastructure owned by Stats Perform (Opta’s parent company) rather than a specialized, room-filling supercomputer…. The system takes massive amounts of historical and live sports data and runs thousands of match-by-match simulations (often 10,000 times per season or tournament) to calculate probability percentages for wins, titles, or relegation.”
We also found this comment on line: “Insiders have noted that the name is a bit of a glamour-driven marketing label for what is essentially a standard probabilistic prediction model.
We also found this on Reddit, “there is a general consensus that the underlying algorithms are not nearly as complex or infallible as the “supercomputer” moniker implies, and predictions frequently miss due to the unpredictable nature of sports.”
So to answer the question, “is there really a supercomputer working out what football results will be?” the answer seems to be a consensus of “No, there is not a physical supercomputer, but rather a marketing term for data-driven statistical and AI simulation models”. It runs on standard cloud or server infrastructure owned by Stats Perform (Opta’s parent company) rather than a specialized, room-filling supercomputer.
And on Reddit we found the note that there is a “general consensus that the underlying algorithms are not nearly as complex or infallible as the “supercomputer” moniker implies, and predictions frequently miss due to the unpredictable nature of sports.
Was that worth the searching? Well, it gave me something to do on an autumnal morning, but these phrases like “super computer” do get bandied around, and I don’t like being confused by names.
In fact, all I did was start from the premise that if there were a supercomputer involved the company would tell us all about it. And they don’t. But of course none of this is proof, because as my physics tutors always told us, in an infinite universe you can’t prove a negative.
So back to the question: can you predict football results on a supercomputer? The answer probably is “no” because no one has ever tried. And they’ve never tried because to do so, would be far too costly, and would use a machine that is being used for something more important already.
