First there were artificial pitches, but soon artificial intelligence will have a place live on a football pitch, at least according to Toulouse FC president Damien Comolli. Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon last month, Comolli said that he expects clubs to utilise AI to improve defensive-decision making, injury-prevention, and analytics on when is […]
First there were artificial pitches, but soon artificial intelligence will have a place live on a football pitch, at least according to Toulouse FC president Damien Comolli.
Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon last month, Comolli said that he expects clubs to utilise AI to improve defensive-decision making, injury-prevention, and analytics on when is best to make a substitution during a game.
“For example: When [Toulouse] played at Anfield [home to Liverpool FC] a few weeks ago, we were losing four-one, our best striker was on the pitch, and we had a game three days later.”
With this in mind, Comolli contacted the club’s analyst, and with the data, they made the decision to take the striker off the pitch.
“If we played him for longer, he might get injured or experience fatigue.”
During his presentation, Comolli explained that every decision made at Toulouse was already driven by data going so far as to say it is part of the club’s culture.
“All the decisions we make on the football side is driven by data, whether we recruit a coach, sign a player, how we play, the way we attack, the way we defend, from where we shoot,” he explained.
“I think we do gain competitive advantage because we decided to go with data, and we stick to it.”
Panel discussing AI in football at Web Summit in Lisbon
According to Comolli, Toulouse FC scored 46% of its goals thanks to data.
“If you don’t adapt to 100% of data decision making, top-to-bottom,” adds Andre Villas-Boas, Portuguese football manager, “you pay a heavy price for it”.
While data-driven AI is looking to make a positive impact on the pitch, other use cases are stirring up debate within the football world.
The Video Assistant Referee — also known as VAR — is now widely used across major football leagues. With it, a virtual referee uses video and semi-automated technology to help assist with the refereeing of games, including offside decisions. But the technology has proven controversial, with critics lambasting its slowing down of games, and unreliable decision making.
In a recent Premier League game, for example, Liverpool saw a goal chalked off due to a VAR mix-up, while several top managers have called for the system to be reassessed.
Still, football analytics provider, Soccerment, believes artificial intelligence will replace all refereeing roles: “Computing vision will be more and more effective in the next few years and the number of cameras on the pitch will only increase.”
“The amount of data that is tagged and the quality of the models that are trained with that data will increase exponentially and thanks to that you will have AI models that can make refereeing decisions on the back of what they see on the pitch.”
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