TacticAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can provide experts with tactical insights, particularly on corner kicks, through predictive and generative AI.
Importantly, it is a full AI system that could give coaches instant, extensive, and accurate tactical insights – that are also practical on the field.
As part of Google’s partnership with Liverpool FC, their DeepMind team have worked on this innovate project for a couple of years in an attempt to revolutionise the way elite football clubs are analysing corner kicks in the sport.
TacticAI demonstrates the potential of assistive AI techniques to revolutionize sports for players, coaches, and fans. Sports like football are also a dynamic domain for developing AI, as they feature real-world, multi-agent interactions, with multimodal data.
TacticAI is built to address three core questions:
- For a given corner kick tactical setup, what will happen? e.g., who is most likely to receive the ball, and will there be a shot attempt?
- Once a setup has been played, can we understand what happened? e.g., have similar tactics worked well in the past?
- How can we adjust the tactics to make a particular outcome happen? e.g., how should the defending players be repositioned to decrease the probability of shot attempts?
TacticAI’s main use is to assist current coaches by finding similar corner kicks and testing different tactics to influence a decision.
Instead of analysts reviewing the footage of previous games over and over again to discover a specific team’s corner routine, the technology computes the numerical representations of players to easily look up past routines.
The AI technology’s generative model allows human coaches to redesign corner kick tactics to optimise probabilities of certain outcomes, such as reducing the probability of a shot attempt for a defensive setup.
TacticAI provides tactical recommendations which adjust positions of all the players on a particular team. From these proposed adjustments, coaches can identify important patterns, as well as key players for a tactic’s success or failure, more quickly.
In Google’s quantitative analysis, it showed that TacticAI was accurate at predicting corner kick receivers and shot situations, and that player repositioning was similar to how real plays unfolded.
Human football experts from Liverpool FC found that the tech’s suggestions cannot be distinguished from real corners and were favoured over their original situations 90% of the time. The data is demonstrating its efficiency and usefulness at the top level.
Google are trying to find new ways to utilise AI in football because the sport is a very dynamic and challenging game to analyse. The company is using this technology to try and blend human expertise (Football coaches and analysts) with the AI’s analysis suggestions to help make coaching at the very top level more efficient.
