Jürgen Klopp announced that he was stepping down as Liverpool manager at the end of this season, after nine years at the club.
Since then, names like Rúben Amorim (Sporting) and Xabi Alonso (Bayer Leverkusen) have been mooted to succeed the German coach at the helm of the Reds next season.
However, for the time being this seems to be a lesser evil for Liverpool - who, with the help of DeepMind, have developed an AI model to make their own tactics.
This new technology was revealed on Tuesday in a study published in Nature. It's called TacticAI and was developed over three years in a partnership between Liverpool Football Club and DeepMind.
Does this technology score goals? No, but...
TacticAI is able to help, for example, coaches prepare free kicks and corner kicks, from both an offensive and defensive point of view. And how? By analyzing real examples, putting similar patterns into perspective and then offering suggestions for tactical changes depending on the opponent.
TacticAI was trained with data from 7176 corners from the 2020/21 English Premier League season, where the positions of each player were analyzed over time, as well as their heights and weights.
In a blind test, Liverpool's experts were unable to distinguish tactics generated by TacticAI from those designed by humans. What's more, in 90% of cases they preferred the AI-generated tactics.
However, despite TacticAI's ability to predict game situations and speaking in a more serious tone, the researchers rejected the idea that the "solution to Klopp's departure" or the replacement of any soccer manager had been found.
"We strongly support AI systems that amplify human capabilities and allow coaches to spend more time on the creative part of their work, rather than on tasks that can be replaced by this type of system," Petar Veličković, one of the leaders of the research, explained to New Scientist.
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Miguel Esteves, ZAP //
