Google builds a curious tool for Klopp in Liverpool: secret to winning the Premier?

He Liverpool is part of an incessant battle with the Manchester City and Arsenal for the Premier League title, the Manager Jurgen Klopp he is seeking his second league crown in England before leaving at the end of the season.

Klopp has been a revolutionary in the world of football for his ways of directing and training his players, always using technology as an important part of the preparation for each match.

For this reason, he decided to test a tool designed by three very important men in this revolution: Julian Wardresponsible for Liverpool's loan program; Karl Tylswho worked at DeepMind, the division of Google AIand Ian Graham, who was Liverpool's director of research.

The three of them met in Ian's office and asked each other several questions: “The big idea was: What if AI could replace the coach?”, although there was some skepticism. “But we didn't want to be too controversial, so we left it alone. “to see if AI could be an assistant coach that advises the coach.”

From there came the idea of TacticAI, an artificial intelligence that allows predicting the result of corner kicks, whether or not they end in a goal. In addition, it offers the coach some tactical suggestions for each specific match.

The tool was presented in Nature Communications and it has become one of the biggest revolutions in football in recent years, showing that artificial intelligence, little by little, is also part of world sport.

How does it work?

The system is used by Manager Jurgen Klopp for some time and is capable of analyzing hours and hours of video of corner kicks to give certain suggestions and ideas to improve the execution of set pieces, a strategy that would be well regarded by 90 percent of the analysts of the Liverpool.

The footballers, as revealed in the presentation, also approved the machine's ideas, leaving aside the practices that have been done for years in the beautiful sport.

TacticAI uses deep geometric learning (Geometric Deep Learning)which allows you to establish and identify certain patterns to make predictions and come up with new ideas.

The tool is capable of predicting details of each corner kick with high accuracy to predict the fina
l result of the play. The AI ​​anticipates patterns of each play to indicate whether the players' movements are correct or not. However, it cannot yet detect why 'human' errors are made in the corner kick.

TacticAI It also allows the German coach to choose the best starting team for each match and gives him ideas to confront his rivals, they explained in Nature Communication, generating new tactics based on the other team's play to increase the possibility of winning.

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