Experts from Liverpool Football Club have collaborated on a new Google artificial intelligence tool suggesting the best tactics to follow when taking a corner, according to a scientific study published on Tuesday.
However, no player in the English team has implemented these recommendations, which an independent expert believes will require verification on the pitch.
Corners have the particularity of freezing a game situation during a match, characterized by fluidity. This facilitates data-driven analysis. Many clubs are already closely studying the optimal combinations for playing this shot.
DeepMind, the Google subsidiary dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI), unveiled in the journal Nature Communications a new assistance tool, TacticAI, supposed to provide suggestions, particularly for corners. The study benefited from the assistance of five experts from the legendary Liverpool FC.
TacticAI offers ideal combinations for defending from a corner or taking advantage of this situation, including very fine adjustments in placement and speed of execution.
In the study, experts were presented with 50 possible combinations of corners, and for each a blind choice between a tactic generated by artificial intelligence and another already used in training.
90% of these specialists retained the solution recommended by TacticAI, according to the study. This would be proof that the assistance tool is “capable of providing useful and concrete suggestions,” DeepMind researcher and co-author of the study Petar Velickovic told AFP.
The AI model is based on “fairly rudimentary” data on the positions, speed, weight and height of players in the English Premier League, he said.
Typically, AI models are trained on datasets numbering in the billions. But on average there are only around ten corners per match, with a few hundred matches in a season.
TacticAI uses a “secret ingredient,” according to Velickovic, geometric deep learning, which virtually manipulates the orientation of the football field to multiply the amount of data available.
The system should be adaptable to other areas of the game, but also to other sports, according to the researchers.
The Liverpool club has already collaborated on other projects with DeepMind, which was originally a British start-up before its acquisition by Google, and whose co-founder Demis Hassabis is a “big fan” of the club, according to the first author of the study, Zhe Wang.
“We will probably see clubs using similar techniques,” believes Mr. Velickovic. Even if Liverpool FC players haven’t gotten into it yet and Reds fans voted the corner hit by Trent Alexander-Arnold and masterfully taken by Divock Origi in the 2019 Champions League against Barcelona as the most beautiful never executed.
But for Andy Harland, professor of sports technology at Britain’s Loughborough University, the usefulness of TacticAI in-game remains doubtful.
Its “value can only be seen through its use in matches,” he told AFP, saying it is just “an additional contribution in an already very crowded field.” Not to mention the fact that “if each uses its own artificial intelligence”, their effects could annihilate each other.
