Liverpool use AI to analyse corners

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,

“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,” Petar Veličković, a DeepMind researcher and co-author of the Nature paper, told the Financial Times.  “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.

TacticAI analysed outcomes from corner kicks with various configurations of players, using criteria such as who received the ball and whether they were able to shoot. It then suggested positional improvements and assessed their plausibility and usefulness in a blind case study by five experts at Liverpool: three data scientists, one video analyst and one coaching assistant.

The experts could not distinguish the AI-generated scenarios from actual match situations, the researchers said, favouring the TacticAI advice 90 per cent of the time over existing strategies. This showed the tool “readily provides useful, realistic and accurate” suggestions, the Nature paper said.

Liverpool did not respond to a request for comment from the Pink ‘Un on whether it had implemented any of TacticAI’s suggested changes, as manager Jürgen Klopp strives to end his tenure on a high note with trophies this May.