A brand new £60m striker and surprise Leicester swoop - AI predicts Nottingham Forest's transfer window
Who will Nottingham Forest sign during the transfer window? We asked AI to figure it out for us...
There are quite a few teams who are expected to be busy before the January transfer deadline – and among them are the Premier League’s surprise package, Nottingham Forest, who remain in the top four and will want to find some reinforcements in order to help them stay there.
A forward to support Chris Wood seems to be at the top of the list, but trying to figure out who they might sign in an unexpectedly chaotic January transfer window is challenging. We know they want Yoane Wissa and might be interested in Matheus Cunha, but will either player be allowed to leave their clubs? And what about all the other strikers who seem to be on the open market in a forward free-for-all?
We’ve given up trying to work out who Forest could sign, so we’ve turned the task over to AI instead, partly out of curiosity and partly to figure out just how close we are to the point at which The Matrix turns out to be a documentary. Is the algorithm actually intelligent, artificial or otherwise, or will it completely miss the mark? Let’s get those predictions in…
AI predicts the players Forest will sign this winter
Matheus Cunha (Wolves, £60m): It looks like the computer reckons that Forest will miss out on first-choice forward Wissa, but they’ll get a pretty good consolation prize in this simulated reality – 25-year-old Cunha, who could play in the number nine and ten roles and bring some serious firepower to the front line.
Will this one really happen? Who knows – Wolves say Cunha is going nowhere, but having stalled on signing a new contract and had his attitude criticised by manager Vitor Pereira, the Brazilian may have other ideas. If he does leave a lot of teams will be in the mix, so we suspect the odds are stacked against the AI here, but it’s not an outrageous guess.
Nasser Djiga (Red Star Belgrade, £7.5m): I’m not sure we should be taking notes from a machine that doesn’t even know Red Star are called Crvena Zvezda these days, but we digress – the AI reckons that Djiga, a Burkina Faso international and ball-playing centre-back, could be on his way to the City Ground.
We’d be lying if we said we watched enough Serbian football to know how good this move would be, but his stats look pretty good at a quick glance. Of course, AI being what it is, we can’t help but note that it seems to have borrowed this idea from Nottinghamshire Live, among others who reported real-life interest. So yeah, there’s a pretty good chance the AI gets this right, in the same way that you tend to do better in a test when you copied the answers from somebody smarter.
Boubakary Soumaré (Leicester City, £20m): Credit the computer where it’s due, we think this suggestion is actually original, even if it feels a little bit vanilla. The French midfielder has been a regular for the Foxes since they returned to the Premier League and has been tidy enough, but we suspect this would seem like a rather underwhelming signing for a team chasing the Champions League dream.
We also suspect that Leicester wouldn’t be keen to shed any starters given their position in the league table, although £20m seems pretty generous to us – Sevilla took him on loan last season and had a buy option worth about £12.5m but didn’t exercise it. Guess that’s the January tax in action.
Will Nottingham Forest sell any players this window?
The AI doesn’t spring too many shocks in its analysis of the players who might depart the City Ground before the window closes on Monday evening – it reckons that both Emmanuel Dennis and Lewis O’Brien will be off before the close of play, and that tallies with what everyone suspects.
Dennis will be off to Sheffield Wednesday on a loan deal, apparently, which seems reasonably plausible, while unwanted midfielder O’Brien will ignore interest from the Championship to go and black for LAFC in the MLS. That’s the one David Beckham didn’t play for, for those who don’t pay too much attention to American football.
The AI isn’t being too original here, and even suggests that Andrew Omobamidele might leave, perhaps for Strasbourg, which is a pretty conservative prediction given that it’s already happened. Seriously, kids, don’t do your homework using this stuff.
The algorithm also suggests that Taiwo Awoniyi, who had been linked with a move to West Ham but who seems keen to stay, will get his wish and remain in place, and also tells us, very specifically, that Forest won’t sell Morgan Gibbs-White.
Why it singled out Gibbs-White isn’t clear, and if anything it feels unsettling that it would so particularly call that one player out given that nobody really thought he was going anywhere. It has the vibe of somebody reassuring you that “nothing terrible will happen to you today” when you didn’t ask and didn’t think it would. Anyway, that’s the end of the AI’s mildly unsettling list of suggestions – do we need to worry about the rise of the robots? Probably not just yet, but if Forest do end up signing Soumaré for £20m, we should probably start doing to the servers what the Luddites did to a Spinning Jenny.