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The world

The last sport the machines can’t price

Near future. The machines took the infrastructure, then the contracts, then most of the work, and nobody has found a way to take any of it back. They never took the Yard: nine a side, two ninety-second halves, and an opponent carried off counts as much as a goal.

A colossal enclosed arena at night, packed tiers of spectators around a floodlit pitch
  1. Industrial surveillance towers and patrolling drones over a distant lit arena

    Nobody announced it

    A power grid here, a freight network there, then the ports, then most of the jobs. Every handover was temporary and every one of them stuck. What is left of the controls now sits in towers that have no door in them. The drones you can see over the arena belong to the same arrangement. They are not up there for the match.

  2. Packed stands of silhouetted spectators with blank banners under arc lights

    The stands are still full

    Nobody disappeared. They fill the tiers by the hundred thousand and the arena runs on the noise they make. Banners with writing on them get confiscated at the gate, which is why the ones you see are blank.

  3. Extreme close-up of a woman’s scarred face inside an open riot-cage helmet

    Under the cage

    Everybody on the pitch is a person, men and women in the same squads. Salvage plate over a graphite undersuit, and a helmet left open at the front so the crowd can tell who is inside it. Machines were tried on this, early on. The stands emptied inside a season.

  4. A woman in armour leaping to drive the charged ball home in a burst of light

    Nine a side, no referee

    Two halves of ninety seconds on an enclosed metal pitch. The clock stops every time somebody has to be carried off, so three minutes of play takes a quarter of an hour. A goal is worth ten. The wall stars and the bounce domes are worth two each, and they are lying around everywhere.

    How a match is scored

  5. A segmented metal ball with a glowing cyan core, trailing electric arcs

    The ball has a reactor in it

    You carry it, you pass it flat along the floor, or you charge a throw and keep steering after it leaves your hands. Put it into one of the five wall stars and the star lights for your side. The same charge knocks a player flat when the ball catches them at speed, and the crowd counts that as part of the evening.

  6. A woman and a man in armour colliding mid-stride, impact sparks bursting between them

    A stretcher is worth a goal

    Off the ball, the action button tackles. Speed against power decides whether the other one stumbles, goes down, or leaves on a stretcher. The last of those is worth ten points, exactly what a goal is worth. Voltcrash Reapers have built a whole squad around it.

  7. Sixteen machined club emblems mounted in a grid on a riveted metal wall

    Sixteen clubs, two divisions

    Eight above, eight below. The emblems bolted along the tunnel wall are older than anyone in the building and most of them outlasted the works that cast them. Crimson Anvils hold the title, and they play in the division above yours.

    The sixteen clubs

  8. Close portrait of the Rustbelt Underdogs captain, a scarred man in worn copper-orange scrap armour

    You get the worst of them

    Rustbelt Underdogs, sixteenth of sixteen, nothing rated above 42 and none of it your doing. Prize money buys ratings in the gym, one point at a time, one player at a time. A league season runs fourteen match days and the career gives you two of them.

  9. Close portrait of the Iron Wardens captain, a woman with a braid under her cage helmet, in heavy gunmetal armour

    What Division 1 looks like

    Iron Wardens top every defensive table in the league and have no interest in entertaining anybody. Their back line rates 88 where yours rates 35. The gym closes that on the instalment plan, and the fixture list does not slow down while you pay.

  10. A woman in copper armour and a man in gunmetal armour squaring up, a glowing ball between them

    The tunnel

    Copper one side, gunmetal the other, a charged ball waiting on the spot between them. The stands have been full since the afternoon. Whatever the table says in May gets decided in ninety-second stretches that all look like this one.

  11. A half-armoured athlete sitting in a dim locker room, helmet on his knees

    The hour before

    Half the armour on, helmet on the knees, one bulb. None of the game happens in this room. It is the part players describe when somebody asks them what it is like.

  12. A converted foundry arena, molten orange glow behind the stands

    Seventeen grounds, all different

    A foundry floor struck flat. A pitch laid over the window of a pressure hull at the bottom of a trench, lit from below. A deck bolted to a tower, in the wind, above the smog. A clay pan with no roof on it at all. A market rooftop in the rain, a greenhouse lost to the moss, sea ice under the aurora, glass poured over lava, and a dome kept for finals nights. The stars, domes, ramps and gates are bolted down in different places in each one, so a tactic that wins here loses two grounds later.

    The grounds, one by one

    • An arena sunk in a pit, its playing floor glowing from beneath like a lit window
    • A rooftop arena at night under a violet sky, city glow far below the platform edge
    • An open-air arena at dusk, amber dust hanging over a hard clay floor
    • A rooftop arena in a rain-soaked megacity, neon signs glowing behind packed stands
    • An arena inside an abandoned greenhouse dome, vines over the stands and pollen in the light
    • An open-air arena on polar sea ice, green and violet aurora reflected on the pitch
    • An arena of black volcanic glass over a glowing rift, embers drifting over the stands
    • An arena on a glass floor above a night reef, glowing jellyfish beneath the pitch
    • Final night under a dome: gold searchlights, confetti and a woman and a man facing off at the centre spot
  13. Three friends in copper armour, two women and a man, laughing together around the ball

    Or just three of you

    Three a side strips it down: a small pitch, no keeper, no bench, one athlete each, man or woman. Open a room, send the code to up to five friends, and the AI takes whatever seats are left. Knocked out, you are back three seconds later.

    Every mode

  14. A vast open arena floor strewn with wrecks as a wall of cyan light sweeps in

    Or a hundred at once

    Battle Arena has no clubs in it. A hundred players on open ground, rings instead of cages, and a wall of light that steps in six times until the safe circle is a few strides across. Whoever is still up takes the bank.

    Every mode

  15. An athlete slumped on the arena floor after full time, stands still lit behind him

    You will lose a lot

    Most of the first season goes badly, and the arena empties around whoever is still sitting on the floor when the lights come up. The game makes a share card out of that night the same way it does out of a win. The defeats travel further.

A woman in copper armour charging with the glowing ball, a man in gunmetal on her heels, framed vertically for a phone screen

Take the Yard with you

The same clash, cropped for a phone. The bodies sit high in the frame so your icons have the bottom third.

Download the wallpaper

Every picture on this page was made for slagball and none of it is borrowed. The tool, the date and what was retouched are recorded with the credits. Credits and legal notice

Why the odds stay human

Pricing a match takes regularities, and this sport does not produce them. The furniture is bolted down somewhere different in every ground, the multiplier is a gauge both sides fight over, and a good share of the scoring happens to bodies rather than to the ball. You get two seasons to turn the worst club in the league into a champion. After that the career closes either way.

Nine Rustbelt Underdogs, men and women in battered copper armour, lined up for a team photo on the arena floor
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