Researchers have developed artificial intelligence to optimize the positioning of players during corners. The Liverpool FC club has been working with Google for three years on the AI model called TacticAI
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The AI learned by watching Liverpool matches! Remember the UEFA Champions League semi-final in 2019. Trent Alexander-Arnold passes to Divock Origi on a corner, a corner kick, resulting in what became Liverpool’s greatest goal . Was it luck, intuition, technique or a computer calculation?
Liverpool FC has been working with Google for three years on the AI model called TacticAI, developed by the DeepMind team, a Google subsidiary specializing in research related to artificial intelligence (AI). They are also behind AlphaFold, an AI capable of predicting protein structure, a tool that could revolutionize biomedical research by accelerating the drug discovery process. TacticAI was created to optimize player positioning during corners. Human experts verified the AI’s performance and found that in 90% of cases, the tactical options offered by TacticAI outperformed those of human trainers.
The new DeepMind TacticAI project is the result of three years of collaboration with Liverpool Football Club, a legendary team in the English Premier League. The aim is to integrate artificial intelligence into football strategies, providing support to human coaches. To do this, the AI model analyzed 7,176 Premier League corners between 2020 and 2023 using a geometric deep learning approach. Knowing that corners represent 30% of goals in this championship, researchers naturally looked for the best way to hit the ball to score.
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This initiative is not a first for the DeepMind team. Behind every game there is a strategy. DeepMind has already developed AI capable of outperforming any player at Go, chess or Shogi, a Japanese chess game, with AlphaGo and AlphaZero. In 2022, after introducing soccer robots, the team launched Graph Imputer, another AI successfully predicting players’ movements on the pitch. The DeepMind TacticAI project could radically transform strategic approaches to training and tactics in football.
