Winning Formula, Special Edition

This is "Winning Formula, Special Edition" — the first newspaper sports section devoted exclusively Big Data in the world of Professional Football. Our Data Analytics Bureau have cross-indexed, funnel-sorted and synthesized a hybrid, temporal quantum analysis to the World's Game, putting many of our own favorite back-alley sports booking operations into a tail spin.

Some implications that we highlight are:

• New measures of player and team performances
• Data manipulation as a form of doping
• High-frequency betting
• Infrastructures (sensors, images) hacking
• Enhanced data services (TV and games)
• New language to describe the roles of players
• Tactics, micro-strategies and their readability
• A resurgence of the local, artisinal, working-class lager.

Winning Formula is an exemplar of using Design Fiction to create an engaging, thought-provoking perspective on a possible, plausible near future world that need not result in either a PowerPoint "deck" nor sad "White" paper. Through the hard work of producing a newspaper section from the near future, we asked ourselves about the future of data + sport, by investigating the intensifying relationship between the two through narrative, design, science, technology and fiction, highlighting the implications of this evolution.

Winning Formula was commissioned by FutureEverything, National Football Museum, Centre for Contemporary Culture Barcelona – CCCB, and Fundación Telefónica.  It was was launched at the National Football Museum in Manchester on March 28, 2014 as part of the Future Everything festival. That day a sample of stories were inserted into 130,000 copies of the Manchester Evening News.

Contributors
Winning Formula is an international, transdisciplinary effort stretching from Europe, South America to the US. It was conceived and directed by Fabien Girardin of Near Future Laboratory in tight collaboration with futurists Scott Smith (Changeist) and Philippe Gargov (Seeklup). It was designed with Bestiario (Andrés Ortiz, Julian Jaramillo and Paola Avellaneda).