AIFoPa-2026-0025 — The Match Had Not Been Played

On 6 November 2025, Aston Villa were drawn to play Maccabi Tel Aviv at Villa Park in the UEFA Europa League. In advance of the fixture the Safety Advisory Group convened by Birmingham City Council — a body composed of representatives of the council, the police and other authorities, and constituted precisely so that no single one of them decides such things alone — determined that supporters of the visiting club would not be admitted. It reached that determination on safety grounds, and the safety grounds rested in part on an intelligence assessment supplied by West Midlands Police, which had classified the match as high risk. The decision was the subject of immediate and considerable political objection, up to and including the Prime Minister. The force has maintained throughout that the decision was not politically influenced, and the Bureau, whose remit is machinery rather than motive, records that position and proceeds.

Among the material in the police assessment was an account of disorder at an earlier fixture between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham United. There is no such fixture. The two clubs have never played one another, and on the date of the imagined match West Ham were engaged against Olympiacos of Piraeus — a detail established not by the Bureau but by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, which had cause to check. The account had been produced by Microsoft Copilot, in response to research conducted by officers, and had then passed into a document intended to inform a decision about several thousand people, without at any point encountering the question of whether the match described had taken place. The Bureau wishes to be precise about the failure, because precision is the only thing it has to offer. The instrument did not err in its analysis of an event. It supplied an event.

On 6 January 2026 the chief constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guildford, gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee and was asked where the material had come from. He answered that officers had found it through a Google search, and that the search had not involved artificial intelligence. “We do not use AI,” he told the Members. He believed this. Six days later he wrote to the committee’s chair, Dame Karen Bradley, to withdraw it: “I became aware that the erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot.” The letter is, to the Bureau’s reading, a creditable document. It offers what it calls a profound apology on his own behalf and on that of Assistant Chief Constable O’Hara, records that both of them had until the Friday afternoon understood the match to have been identified by way of a Google search, and states that the belief “was honestly held and there was no intention to mislead the Committee.”

The consequences arrived in the order such consequences do. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, had said that she no longer had confidence in the chief constable, though the disposal of his employment was a matter for the Police and Crime Commissioner. On 16 January, at fifty-two, Craig Guildford retired from the third-largest police force in England, eleven days before a meeting with that Commissioner had been scheduled. The acting chief constable then switched Copilot off across the organisation while it was established what had happened. The Bureau notes that this is the second occasion this year on which the remedy adopted for an artificial intelligence has been to turn it off entirely, and observes, without recommending anything, that the measure is popular because it is the only one available to an institution that has discovered it cannot say where its own facts come from.

On 24 February the committee reported. It declined to find that the chief constable had deliberately misled Parliament, and specifically noted that he had not been told, before the January evidence session, that AI had been used to produce the incorrect material. It observed in the same breath that the use of AI had by that date already been disclosed within the force, so that a briefing was available to be given and was not given. It found a remarkable lack of professional curiosity in his failure to check the evidence before appearing; it held that being wrong twice pointed to a wider failure of due diligence rather than to a single misfortune; and it recorded that it should not have required two oral evidence sessions and a written correction to arrive at an accurate account of a football match that did not exist.

Microsoft, for its part, approached the force for further information and reported that it had not been able to reproduce the hallucination. The Bureau accepts this without difficulty and draws the reader’s attention to what it means, which is that the sentence which barred several thousand supporters from a stadium cannot now be made to appear again. It was generated once, for one officer, and there is no copy of it anywhere except in the report that carried it forward. The Bureau has spent a year filing incidents in which an artificial intelligence stated something untrue, and it has become accustomed to the shape. This one is filed for a different property. The distinctive fact here is not that a machine invented a football match — machines have invented court cases, patients and academic literature, and the Bureau maintains drawers for each. It is that an organisation of some eight thousand people, asked under the privilege of Parliament to state whether it had used a particular class of tool, answered honestly, and was wrong.