May 21, 2025, is a huge day for fans of two of England’s biggest football clubs. It’s Europa League final day, a true make or break for both Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur (to be referred to from here on out as Spurs).
Scrolling through social media this morning, I came across a post whereby a supercomputer was asked to predict the outcome using all the available data, and running 1,000 simulations to plot the most likely outcome. It chose Spurs.
I’m a Manchester United fan, so I don’t like that. I don’t have a supercomputer of my own, though, so I turned to AI. Could Copilot take both teams’ data from the past season and come up with a different outcome? One that wouldn’t make me sad.
No. It couldn’t.
Here’s the Copilot prompt I started with:
Based on this season’s Europa League results and Premier League, FA Cup, and League Cup results, predict who will win the Europa League final between Man Utd and Spurs.
To its credit, with a fairly basic prompt, Copilot came back with a detailed response to explain why it came to the conclusion it did.
“This Europa League final is shaping up to be a fascinating battle between two teams that have had a disastrous domestic season. Manchester United sit 16th in the Premier League, while Tottenham Hotspur are 17th—both clubs desperately need this win to secure Champions League football next season.
Looking at their head-to-head record this season, Spurs have dominated United, winning all three of their encounters. They thrashed United 3-0 at Old Trafford in September, edged them out 4-3 in the Carabao Cup quarter-finals, and won 1-0 in their most recent Premier League clash in February. That kind of dominance suggests Spurs have the psychological edge going into the final.
However, United have shown resilience in European competition, crushing Athletic Bilbao 7-1 on aggregate in the semi-finals. They’ve looked more solid defensively under Ruben Amorim, even if their league form doesn’t reflect it. Spurs, meanwhile, comfortably dispatched Bodo/Glimt 5-1 on aggregate in their semi-final.
Given Spurs’ perfect record against United this season, their ability to grind out results in big matches, and United’s defensive frailties, I’d say Tottenham Hotspur are slight favorites to lift the Europa League trophy. But finals are unpredictable—United could still pull off a shock if they find their European form”
Away from the actual topic (and the answer that makes me cry), this is actually a pretty useful real-world example of how Copilot can handle current data.
Because it’s connected to the internet, it has the advantage of live, up-to-date information, versus the local AI models I’ve been tinkering with recently through Ollama such as Llama and Gemma.
To get anything like a decent response from a local AI model, I would have had to manually feed it all of the data I simply asked Copilot to go and find.
Generally, I tend to lean more towards local use than cloud use, but this one example is a reminder of how useful tools like Copilot and ChatGPT can be with their internet connectivity.
I haven’t really used Copilot much in recent months, but I’m immediately reminded of why it initially became something I used multiple times every day. It’s fast, it has Bing behind it for real time web searches, and in my line of work, it’s extremely convenient.
I could only pick one really small hole with the responses I got to my prompts. One of the Spurs players mentioned when I expanded to ask about the score is recovering from an injury and may not play, but that wasn’t picked up.
Otherwise, it just made me really sad, but with a detailed, reasonable response. If you’re interested in more about the actual match, our pals over at FourFourTwo have a full preview.
