Liverpool have taken advantage of AI to score twice at San Siro against AC Milan in the UEFA Champions League. The Reds know what they’re doing.
Liverpool started atrociously against AC Milan on Tuesday. A mistake by Kostas Tsimikas left the hosts in and Christian Pulisic scored inside four minutes for 1-0.
But the Reds rebounded. First, Ibrahima Konaté bagged his first Liverpool goal in two and a half years by heading home from a Trent Alexander-Arnold corner. Then came the second – a close-range header from Virgil van Dijk off a Tsimikas corner.
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Set pieces, then, and that’s not a coincidence. Liverpool have made some incredible strides in their preparation on corner – including the use of AI.
Per the Athletic, the Reds teamed up with Google DeepMind this summer, building strategies for scoring from corners. So how does that work?
Liverpool’s AI corners
Nearly 10,000 corners were fed into the AI, along with data on each player involved. That data included the height, weight and starting position of players to find the likelihood of who wins the ball.
From there, Liverpool can send subsequent teams’ data into the system to find how they’d contend with any given corner. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that both corners were so similar.
We can extrapolate here that Liverpool’s AI determined that Milan would struggle against Konaté and Van Dijk if the ball was sent into the six-yard box. That’s certainly how things panned out – the Reds made it look simple with two very routine set-pieces.
William Spearman leads Liverpool’s research department now after Ian Graham’s departure and it’s clear that things are still travelling along the right path. The department was renowned under Graham and it’s renowned under Spearman – a paper was published on the AI research: TacticAI: an AI assistant for football tactics.
Perhaps this is just the beginning, then. Liverpool could well be pioneers because it’s a line of thought that appears to work.
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