Football · Altcast

AI can fake Haaland. It cannot fake caring who wins.

A clip went round of Erling Haaland in a restaurant, catching his own reflection and flinching at it. It pulled more than 31 million views on X inside a few days. Fact checkers traced it back to a skit by two Chinese creators, Jin Long and Qiu Qiu, with Haaland's face pasted over the top. Community Notes flagged it almost straight away. The numbers kept climbing regardless.

That is the tournament we are actually living through. Somewhere alongside the football, a second World Cup is being played out entirely inside video models.

The genres have already settled

Give a subculture a few months and it invents its own formats. There are the anime edits, where a group stage fixture is restyled as a shonen tournament arc and Haaland and Mbappe face off with power levels. There are the cinematic trailers, entire fake films cut for a competition that is still being played. There is a whole how-to economy on top, channels teaching you the workflow, startups selling you a one click anime edit.

Then there is the meme wing, which is stranger and funnier. Dictator Mbappe began with a kebab. A French influencer named a sandwich after him, Mbappe's lawyers sent a legal notice, and the influencer shot back that Mbappe had turned his own name into a dictatorship. The joke calcified into an aesthetic: Mbappe in military regalia, Mbappe reviewing the troops. One edit did 13.2 million views in a fortnight. Elsewhere Gianni Infantino keeps turning up in AI clips fussing over Messi like a favourite son, which is really just the old suspicion that FIFA loves Argentina, redrawn as slapstick.

Plenty of it is junk

Some of this is straightforwardly rubbish. Fox Sports paid 485 million dollars for the American rights and still got dragged for posting an AI clip of its own. Engagement farms have worked out that a fabricated photo of two fans kissing travels further than a real one, and they are not going to stop. Deepfake trackers have counted thousands of scam adverts wearing footballers' faces.

But the good material is not junk, and it is worth being precise about why. It is fans making things about a team they love, using tools that used to require a studio and a budget. Haaland himself gets the joke. When fans edited him and Vinicius Junior into White Chicks, he saw it and asked them to remake it for real.

The one thing the model cannot do

Here is what no video model can generate. It cannot want Norway to win.

It can render a flawless trailer for a match that has not kicked off. It cannot sit through the ninety minutes with its stomach in a knot. It holds no grudge against the referee. It has no cousin in Rabat texting at half time. Every one of those edits is a fan's feeling put through a model, and the feeling arrived first. The machine is downstream of somebody caring.

That feeling has an older format than any of this, and it is audio. Somebody who cares, talking, live, while it is still happening and nobody knows how it ends. It is why people mute the official feed and go looking for a voice that is unmistakably on their side, in their language, saying the thing they are thinking.

An AI can make you the anime after your team wins. It cannot sit with you while it is still nil nil and you have stopped breathing. That part is still ours.