The West Midlands chief constable has apologized after citing a fictitious match invented to justify keeping Maccabi Tel Aviv fans away
The chief constable of the UK’s third-largest police force has admitted that evidence used to justify banning fans of an Israeli football club from attending a Europa League match in Birmingham last year was generated by artificial intelligence and referred to a game that never took place.
West Midlands Police Chief Constable Craig Guildford offered a “profound apology” to a parliamentary committee on Monday, admitting an “erroneous result” in his intelligence report came from using Microsoft Copilot AI.
The report referenced a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham United in November 2023 as part of its safety assessment. However, the match never actually took place as West Ham played Olympiacos on that date, while Maccabi played in Poland.
Guildford, who initially denied AI was involved, stated in a letter that he had “honestly” believed the match had been “identified by way of a Google search” and insisted he had “no intention to mislead the Committee.”
The AI-generated evidence was used to support West Midlands Police’s recommendation to Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group to ban Maccabi fans from a Europa League match against Aston Villa in November 2025. The decision was also based heavily on the force’s assessment of violent clashes involving Maccabi supporters during an away match against Ajax in Amsterdam in November 2024.
However, the Dutch police have since directly challenged the British force’s characterization of those events, disputing key claims, including that Maccabi fans had thrown people into an Amsterdam river. They stated the only such incident involved a Maccabi fan being forced into the water while assailants shouted anti-Semitic slurs. They also contradicted the scale of the police operation, saying it required 1,200 officers, not the 5,000 claimed by West Midlands Police.
UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said West Midlands force had a “failure of leadership” that “harmed the reputation and eroded public confidence in West Midlands police and policing more broadly.” She added that she has lost confidence in Guildford but lacks the legal power to remove him.
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