DeepMind Develops Tactic AI With Liverpool: A New AI Model That’ll Make Better Football Strategies

• Google-run DeepMind has created a new AI model called Tactic AI for Liverpool that will help teams plan their corner kicks better
• In 9 out of 10 scenarios, football experts preferred the AI's suggestions over what experts had previously followed
• The tool was developed after a research of 3 years and studying 7,000+ corner kicks

AI will now be used to develop football tactics. DeepMind (owned by Google) has partnered with Liverpool FC to create an AI tool, named Tactic AI, that can help plan corner-kick strategies.

Corner kicks take place when a ball goes out of play over the goal line without being touched by a member of the defending team or making it to the goal. A player is then allowed to take a shot from the corner, nearest to the place where the ball crossed the goal line.

Corner kicks are believed to be a good scoring opportunity hence a lot of planning goes into it.

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How Was The Tool Built?Tactic AI has learned from more than 7,176 corner kicks that took place during the Premier League season in England between the period of 2020 to 2021.

It's important to note that the average number of corner kicks per player in the season was 10. So the rest of the shots from different directions were created through geometric deep learning' technology.

A DeepMind team led by Petar Velikovi and the Liverpool team collaborated over a 3-year part-time project to create TacticAI.

On top of studying each kick, it also assessed the position of individual players and their height and weight to see how it influenced the final shot.

The tool can autonomously predict which player is more likely to get the corner shot and how likely they are to be able to make it. It also offers suggestions on how you can successfully make a goal if the initial chances are less.

The most interesting part of the research was that in 9 out of 10 scenarios, the experts from the Liverpool club preferred the suggestions offered by AI over the real-life strategies that are usually used in the field.

What makes this more interesting is that the experts were subjected to a blind test i.e. when they selected corner kick suggestions, they didn't know if it was AI-generated or human-made.

This demonstrates TacticAI's predictions are not only accurate, but useful and deployable.Tactic AI researchers

He further assured that this project is not an attempt to drive actual coaches out of their jobs. It's merely meant to enhance their ability to make better decisions by providing a simpler data processing unit.

The findings of this study have also been published in the Nature Communications journal.

Corner kicks are just the beginning. If everything goes well, the tool is expected to help in the following areas as well:

• Expand to penalty kicks and player movement prediction.
• Provide an overall insight into the matches, helping the coaches come up with the best strategies to optimize results on the field.

This isn't the first time AI has stepped foot in the sports industry, Prior to this, IBM and Masters worked together to create an AI that can create automated audio commentary for more than 20,000 video clips of match plays.

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