TacticAI: An AI Assistant for Expert Football Tactics, Tested by Liverpool FC

KEY FACT: Google DeepMind in collaboration with Liverpool Football Club has developed a generative and predictive artificial intelligence (AI) tool to assist Expert Football Tactics modeling.

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Image Source - Google Deepmind

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TacticAI is a generative and predictive artificial intelligence (AI) tool created by Google DeepMind to provide experts with football tactical insights, particularly on corner kicks. Google DeepMind claims that TacticAI can match expert football tactics and predict the outcome of corner kicks.

TacticAI was developed and evaluated together with experts from Liverpool Football Club as part of a multi-year research collaboration. TacticAI’s suggestions were preferred by human expert raters 90% of the time over tactical setups seen in practice.

According to a research report on Nature Communications, TacticAI incorporates both a predictive and a generative component, which allows the coaches to effectively sample and explore alternative player setups for each corner kick routine and to select those with the highest predicted likelihood of success.

The design of TacticAI is rooted in learning efficient representations of corner kick tactics from raw, spatiotemporal player tracking data. This data is used by representing each corner kick situation as a graph—a natural representation for modeling relationships between players.

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Image Source - Google Deepmind

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Google DeepMind in detailing the technology through a blog post mentioned that the combination of generative and predictive AI in TacticAI build is to achieve “state-of-the-art results”. The blog post also furthered:

“TacticAI demonstrates the potential of assistive AI techniques to revolutionise sports for players, coaches and fans,”

“Our system allows coaches to sample alternative player setups for each routine of interest, and then directly evaluate the possible outcomes of such alternatives.”

Outputs of tactics generated by the AI system were found to be indistinguishable from human-designed tactics in a blind test, according to the study detailing the technology.

According to DeepMind, TacticAI is not designed to replace human coaches, but rather assist them.

“TacticAI’s generative model also allows human coaches to redesign corner kick tactics to optimize probabilities of certain outcomes, such as reducing the probability of a shot attempt for a defensive setup.”

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A bird’s eye overview of TacticAI. - TacticAI Research

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With growing research and safety concerns about AI, generative and predictive AI designs are being iterated in such a way as to enhance human performance and bring some level of precision to human processes.

The sports sector, especially football is a dynamic domain for developing AI, as they feature real-world, multi-agent interactions, with multimodal data. Advancing AI for sports could translate into many areas on and off the field – from computer games and robotics to traffic coordination, and many more.

Without a doubt, TacticAI will revolutionize sports for players, coaches, and fans. This AI tool will address three core issues related to tactics for corner kicks: (1) who is most likely to receive the ball, and will there be a shot attempt? (2) have similar tactics worked well in the past? (3) how should the defending players be repositioned to decrease the probability of shot attempts?

What are your thoughts on this novel AI use case in the sports sector?

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