If you thought that the power of AI was going to stay limited to creating videos of Winston Churchill jamming to the tunes of Dua Lipa, you have another thing coming. The creativity of football fans along with the power of AI was always heading towards only one direction, memes. Those who were used to consuming memes only as images and gifs had a field day seeing the new AI-generated video of football personalities.
Earlier this week, videos of famous footballers and managers dancing on the stage made with the help of AI made the fandom go crazy. The context of the video is how managers of players celebrate while seeing the world burn down. The sarcastic undertone of the video adds to the atmosphere in it, making it an overnight sensation.
The video was made famous by a begrudged Manchester United fan who was apparently tired of United’s dismal performance. The video was originally made to praise the young guns of the club, Willy Kambwala, Alejandro Garnacho, and Kobbie Mainoo before their fixture against Bournemouth. However, the meme was turned on its head after United only managed a 2-2 draw in the match, that too courtesy of a Bruno Fernandes brace.
The trend soon caught on as all the fans wanted to make one for their manager or players as well. While some took the creative liberty to show how ‘cold’ their manager was, some used the opportunity to throw banters at their rival clubs.
After the first video of Ten Hag surfaced, videos of Mikel Arteta, Harry Kane, Ange Postecoglou followed on. Among the lot, the ones with Ange got the most number of views on the platform. The videos carried the emotion and frustration of the fans in a very funny and apt manner.
The video was made on a new multimedia AI platform named Viggle AI. It is the body of the intended personalities superimposed on Lil Yachty’s live performance back in 2023. Although the American hip hop artist’s ‘walk’ in the video looks very cool in its own right, the sudden AI trend has given it a huge boost taking the video to close to five million views.
Looking at it from the creative point of view, Ten Hag’s body fit the video perfectly and its other aspects also matched perfectly. The fans were also united in making fun of their players and clubs. On the original post, while most people were interacting with how apt the video was, some even wanted the owner of the post to make videos for them.
The trend originated from a deep fake video of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker in the same template. Apart from the football universe, the meme has also gotten a lot of traction on other social networks.