AI Assistant for Football Tactics by Google DeepMind
In this talk, Petar Veličković, Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, will introduce TacticAI – an AI football tactics assistant developed and evaluated in collaboration with domain experts from Liverpool Football Club.
In this work, Google DeepMind researchers focused on analyzing corner kicks, one of the most crucial areas for game improvement in football.
TacticAI includes both a predictive and a generative component, allowing coaches to explore alternative player setups for each corner kick routine and to select those with the highest predicted likelihood of success.
The researchers validated TacticAI on a number of relevant benchmark tasks: predicting receivers, shot attempts, and recommending player position adjustments.
As a result of this research, TacticAI’s model suggestions are not only indistinguishable from real tactics but are also favored over existing tactics by domain experts 90% of the time.