New Digital Technologies research informs smarter football coaching
An academic from the Institute for Digital Technologies discusses how the football industry is using AI research for smarter football coaching, and explains how his research hopes to support this development.
Lecturer from the Institute for Digital Technologies, Dr Varuna De Silva has published an article with The Conversation on how the football industry is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to inform smarter football coaching. An extract from the article is provided below. To read the full article, please visit The Conversation online.
The best footballers aren’t necessarily the ones with the best physical skills. The difference between success and failure in football often lies in the ability to make the right split-second decisions on the field about where to run and when to tackle, pass or shoot. So how can clubs help players train their brains as well as their bodies?My colleagues and I are working with Chelsea FC academy to develop a system to measure these decision-making skills using artificial intelligence (AI). We’re doing this by analysing several seasons of data that tracks players and the ball throughout each game, and developing a computer model of different playing positions. The computer model provides a benchmark to compare the performance of different players. This way we can measure the performance of individual players independent of the actions of other players.Dr Varuna De Silva, Institute for Digital Technologies
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