A few weeks ago, I was invited to join my newsroom’s Fantasy Premier League. As an eager new American staffer at a British newspaper, of course I accepted the chance to join in assembling an imaginary team of real-life players and scoring points based on their actual statistical performance. One doesn’t want to be rude, after all.

That’s when the problems started, chief among them that I had no idea whom to select for my team. I enjoy football as an aesthetic experience but not so much as an analytical one; I’m no great student of formations, form, the transfer market, injury reports or management politics. So I searched for the shortcut that any clueless empiricist with a laptop would these days: machine learning.

On GitHub, I discovered the code developed by some real-deal programmers for a system called AIrsenal and stole it, er, implemented it on my machine. AIrsenal uses a “Bayesian approach”, estimates a “conditional distribution”, leverages “Monte Carlo integration” and uses more than a couple of Greek letters in its underpinning maths. Select, copy, paste, enter. A curtain of blocky green numbers geysered up my black terminal window, simulating fixtures yet to be played, goals yet to be scored, victories yet to be celebrated.