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 a...