Google and Liverpool FC have teamed up to develop a new AI system that could revolutionize football tactics. The result of this collaboration is TacticAI, an AI assistant that provides expert insights on corner kicks.
For those who don't watch football (what Americans call soccer), corner kicks are crucial set pieces that offer prime opportunities for scoring. However, devising effective routines requires a complex blend of intuition and pattern recognition to analyze opponents and adapt in real-time. TacticAI uses predictive and generative AI models to analyze previous plays and suggest tactical adjustments.
Published in Nature, the DeepMind research behind TacticAI demonstrates its potential to assist coaches through state-of-the-art performance, despite limited training data. By representing game situations as graphs and applying geometric deep learning, TacticAI achieves strong generalization from a small dataset.
The system addresses three key questions: predicting what will happen for a given corner kick setup, understanding what occurred in past setups, and suggesting adjustments to optimize outcomes. TacticAI's predictive model accurately forecasts ball receivers and shot attempts, while the generative component proposes player repositioning to increase or decrease scoring probabilities.
Blind evaluations with Liverpool FC's experts found that TacticAI's suggestions were indistinguishable from real tactics and were preferred 90% of the time over existing setups. The system enables efficient retrieval of relevant historical routines and interactive exploration of alternative tactics.
The research collaboration between Google and Liverpool FC showcases AI's potential to revolutionize sports analytics. While focused on football, the core techniques could translate to other domains like gaming, robotics, and traffic coordination. TacticAI represents a major milestone in developing practical AI assistants that augment human expertise in the real world.