DeepMind and Liverpool are creating an AI to advise on football tactics

Researchers from DeepMind and Liverpool Football Club have developed an artificial intelligence model, TacticAI, capable of predicting the outcomes of corner kicks and helping coaches develop effective tactics.

Here's What We Know

As part of a three-year collaboration, the scientists trained TacticAI on data from 7,176 corner kicks from the 2020/21 Premier League season. The model learnt to identify which player would be the first to receive the ball after a feed, guessing one of three candidates 78% of the time.

With TacticAI, coaches can design attacking or defensive schemes that maximise or minimise the likelihood of a certain player touching the ball first. To do this, the AI analyses real-life examples of corner kicks and suggests changes to the formation.

In a blind test, Liverpool experts were unable to distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated tactics and favoured the model-generated option 90% of the time.

Petar Veličković, one of TacticAI's developers, emphasises that AI is meant to help coaches, not replace them completely.

"We are strongly in support of AI systems that amplify human capabilities and leave them more time for the creative part of their work" he stated.

Veličković said the research also has wider applications outside of sport, allowing it to better model aspects of human psychology. In the future, such abilities could help AI better understand uncertainty and make decisions.

Source: New Scientist