DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company, has collaborated with Liverpool Football Club to develop TacticAI, an AI system designed to revolutionize football tactics, starting with corner kicks. The AI draws inspiration from the unforgettable play in the 2019 UEFA Champions League semi-finals, which resulted in a legendary goal from Origi. TacticAI will attempt to recreate such plays by combining human intuition and AI optimization.
TacticAI was built on the foundations of an earlier project named Game Plan from 2020, which initially aimed to use AI for football analysis and strategy. This evolved into complex predictive models that could anticipate off-camera player movements. The present study, published in Nature Communications, describes how TacticAI leverages geometric deep learning to create models that can predict corner outcomes and analyze football tactics.
Examining 7,176 corner kicks from the 2020 to 2021 Premier League seasons, researchers transformed each corner into a graph representation. Each player was a node in the graph, with data on their performance such as conferring player positioning, movements, and other physical attributes at the time of the kick. The AI then analyzed these spatial interactions and strategies using graph neural networks (GNNs).
The TacticAI system outperformed traditional approaches and was the preferred choice of expert evaluators 90% of the time. Moreover, it could predict both corner receivers and shot takers. The system serves three main functions: predicting likely outcomes of corner kicks, analyzing past tactics in similar scenarios, and recommending tactical adjustments to finetune future approaches.
In tests, TacticAI achieved an F1 score of 0.71 in predicting shot attempts from corner kicks, demonstrating high accuracy. It also had top-3 test accuracy of 0.782 in predicting which player would likely first receive the ball after a corner. When proposing player position and movement adjustments for optimized tactical setups, TacticAI was preferred by qualitative expert evaluators.
In summary, TacticAI aids coaches in refining corner kick strategies, and bettering offensive and defensive outcomes. It might even lead to Liverpool FC turning unpredictable corners into more injury-time winners, signifying a timely advantage for events where stakes are high. The development of TacticAI is a testament to the power of AI in transforming sports strategies, and serving as an invaluable tool for coaches and players alike.
