GOOGLE DEEPMIND UNVEILS AI FOOTBALLS TACTICS COACH HONED WITH LIVERPOOL

Human experts prefer TacticAI’s suggested positional improvements at corner kicks

 

Liverpool’s Kostas Tsimikas takes a corner during the team’s match against Sparta Praha on March 14 © Alex Livesey/Getty Images

Google DeepMind has developed a prototype artificial intelligence football tactician in collaboration with Premier League club Liverpool, in the latest push to use the technology to master the ebb and flow of big-money sports.

The computerised coach’s suggested improvements to players’ positions at corner kicks — a large potential source of goals — mostly won approval from human experts, according to a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.

DeepMind, which has previously used its algorithms to crack difficult board games such as Go, said patterns seen on sports fields could also offer lessons on how to apply AI in other areas such as robotics and traffic co-ordination.

On the pitch, the company’s TacticAI system reflects both the possibilities and current limitations of intensive efforts to use AI to gain a sporting edge beyond that offered by existing data analysis methods.

The technology promises benefits in planning for situations with predictable starting points, such as corners. The wider task is to apply it to the richer variability of open play.

“What’s exciting about it from an AI perspective is that football is a very dynamic game with lots of unobserved factors that influence outcomes,” said Petar Veličković, a DeepMind researcher and co-author of the Nature paper. “It’s a really challenging problem.”

"The DeepMind project is the product of three years of work with Liverpool on deploying AI, including in areas such as penalty kicks and predicting movements of players.

DeepMind’s latest model uses geometric deep learning on a data set comprising 7,176 corner kicks from the English Premier League between 2020 and 2023. Corner kicks represent a significant opportunity for attacking teams: along with other so-called set pieces, such as free kicks, they account for about 30 per cent of all goals.

- Michael Peel,