6 research outputs found
Game Plan: What AI can do for Football, and What Football can do for AI
The rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has opened unprecedented
analytics possibilities in various team and individual sports, including baseball, basketball, and
tennis. More recently, AI techniques have been applied to football, due to a huge increase in
data collection by professional teams, increased computational power, and advances in machine
learning, with the goal of better addressing new scientific challenges involved in the analysis of
both individual players’ and coordinated teams’ behaviors. The research challenges associated
with predictive and prescriptive football analytics require new developments and progress at the
intersection of statistical learning, game theory, and computer vision. In this paper, we provide
an overarching perspective highlighting how the combination of these fields, in particular, forms a
unique microcosm for AI research, while offering mutual benefits for professional teams, spectators,
and broadcasters in the years to come. We illustrate that this duality makes football analytics
a game changer of tremendous value, in terms of not only changing the game of football itself,
but also in terms of what this domain can mean for the field of AI. We review the state-of-theart and exemplify the types of analysis enabled by combining the aforementioned fields, including
illustrative examples of counterfactual analysis using predictive models, and the combination of
game-theoretic analysis of penalty kicks with statistical learning of player attributes. We conclude
by highlighting envisioned downstream impacts, including possibilities for extensions to other sports
(real and virtual)