A new study uses AI to simulate ‘what if’ scenarios in football, revealing how coordinated team behaviour can improve the chances of scoring goals.
Football is a team sport built around coordinated play to score goals – but improving goal-scoring potential lies not just in how how players pass the ball, but also in how they move and coordinate without it.
It is this aspect of the game that a research team led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing wanted to analyse. In particular, they were keen to better understand a common defensive tactic called a low block, which is especially challenging to break down. It involves a team defending in a tight, narrow shape very deep in their own half of the pitch, just outside of their penalty area. When the opposition meets this low block, the weight of numbers and lack of space makes it very hard for them to find opportunities to score.
In their study, the researchers developed an AI model that learns from real-world match data to better understand...