Artificial intelligence gives football fans another thing to argue about
It's impossible to overstate the devotion that Liverpool fans have to their soon-departing manager, Jurgen Klopp. Picking the team up from mid-table doldrums almost a decade ago, the charismatic German transformed it into champions of England and Europe once again.
The shock announcement that he has decided to leave the club this summer provoked a wave of grief among the Liverpudlians who call themselves a Red. And then, of course, one big question: Who will succeed him?
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It will be a human, we can assume. Of all the jobs threatened by artificial intelligence, the role of football manager isn't yet one of them. But as the 131-year-old club looks for its next manager, it has also been quietly helping researchers at Google's DeepMind AI unit work on a revolutionary project: an AI that can inform and enhance a team's tactics on the field. Early results show great potential, raising profound questions about how much technology should be allowed to seep into the world's favorite game.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, first reported on by the Financial Times, researchers described how the club had helped Google's team build a system that could suggest better ways for an attacking team to organize itself for a corner kick to increase the likelihood of scoring.
Developed over the course of the last three years, it is not known whether TacticAI has been utilized by Liverpool for help preparing for a real match. But, researchers say, human experts at the club(1) agreed with 90% of the system's suggestions on how to best reposition players to improve the likelihood of scoring.
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The system was trained on an analysis of 7,176 corner kicks taken in the Premier League between 2020 and 2023, taking into account where players were positioned as well as their
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