What Exactly is TacticAI and How Does It Benefit Football Coaches?

With AI writing tools taking over the planet, it has many concerned that it’s only a matter of time before it seeps into other parts of everyday life. That has already been happening for years with automation a key part of the way the world works on a day-to-day basis. However, within football, the use of AI is bare minimum with few and far using the various tools that artificial intelligence has to offer.

But that changed in March after Liverpool FC partnered with Google to develop a “full AI system” called TacticAI in order to advise and help coaches on corner kicks. This came as a shock to many with fans and critics alike wondering why the Reds had taken the step into the AI world. However, the news has gone down well with a few especially as it offers the club more chances to score goals and win games.

What is TacticAI?

The AI system has been used to identify patterns and tactics used over the course of Premier League history to give coaches tactical advice. The groundbreaking product has reportedly learned from over 7000 corners taken from Premier League matches between 2020 and 2021, and worked with tracking data — which consists of player coordinates — to suggest offensive and defensive improvements to coaches.

The software was initially focused on the entire game before Liverpool asked the creators to focus on a more precise approach, by focusing on corners. The AI software can reportedly forecast which player will make first contact, whether a shot will follow and then provides suggestions to the coaches and analysts.

An example provided was that TacticAI could analyze a defensive corner setup of a rival team, and then recommend how to position various attackers to make the most of the set-up. Not only that, it can also recommend which corner taker might be best suited to take a particular corner and so on.

The system isn’t just predictive as it also offers a generative component for coaches and analysts to tweak and explore alternative player setups for each corner kick routine.

How does it benefit football coaches?

At the bare minimum, TacticAI could revolutionize sports analytics, especially football analytics, and offer teams like Liverpool more chances to find the net. Since the Reds earn more than 200 corners a season, the ability to increase their chances of scoring will likely increase their chances of winning. Not only that, the creators of TacticAI have asserted that the program isn’t intended to take over the job of a human being but instead to assist and help make them even more efficient and better.

This is because work analysing corner kick routines is done by analysts who watch several videos of games to study the way the opposition prepares their teams before an offensive or defensive corner. That was all but confirmed by Petar Velickovic, who works for Google DeepMind, and he asserted that this offers top football clubs an edge that they’re looking for.

“An AI system can go through the data quickly and point out errors a team is making – I think that’s the added value you can get from AI assistants. Top clubs are always searching for an edge, and I think our results indicate that techniques like these are likely going to become a part of modern football going forward,” Petar Velickovic said, reported the Training ground guru.

“We are strongly in support of AI systems that amplify human capabilities and leave them more time for the creative part of their work, rather than a system that would replace them,”

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