TacticAI: Google DeepMind's AI-powered Soccer Coach

2024-03-21

TacticAI, a "Football Tactical AI Assistant" developed in collaboration with Liverpool Football Club, utilizes geometric deep learning technology to predict corner kick outcomes, analyze past performances, and suggest tactical adjustments. Google DeepMind has officially launched a comprehensive AI system specifically designed to provide corner kick advice to football coaches. TacticAI is described as a "Football Tactical AI Assistant." This AI system, developed in partnership with Liverpool FC, one of the top-performing teams in the UK, offers tactical insights to experts through predictive and generative AI. Google DeepMind announced this news in a blog post yesterday, stating that the tool works by "employing geometric deep learning techniques to help create more generalized models." This means that teams from around the world can simulate different player formations to evaluate potential outcomes and achieve their desired results. To evaluate the performance of TacticAI, they built a dataset using 7,176 corner kick data from the 2020-2021 Premier League season. The data was randomized and divided into training and testing sets. During usage, this tool aims to address three core questions. These include: 1. What will happen with a given corner kick tactical layout? For example, who is most likely to receive the ball and will there be an attempt on goal? 2. Can we understand what happened after a particular layout was used? For instance, have similar tactics been successful in the past? 3. How can we adjust tactics to achieve specific outcomes? For example, how should defensive players reposition themselves to reduce the probability of a shot on goal? In blind tests with football experts, TacticAI's suggestions were "indistinguishable" from real corner kicks in previous matches. When asked to choose their preferred tactical advice, these experts leaned towards the AI's ideas 90% of the time, rather than the original recommendations. Three years ago, Google announced a multi-year partnership with Liverpool Football Club. In their joint publication in 2021 titled "Advancing Sports Analytics through AI Research," football was highlighted as an interesting opportunity for AI. A year later, Graph Imputer was born. Graph Imputer demonstrated how AI, in conjunction with a prototype prediction system, can be used for downstream tasks in football analysis. When tracking data is unavailable, this system can predict player movements off-camera. The newly launched TacticAI is the third exploration in the field of AI and sports by Google DeepMind and Liverpool Football Club. (Note: The HTML tags have been retained as requested, but the style and class attributes have been removed.)