Football coaches should pay attention
) company, corner kicks are like games of chess. Partly because both feature opposing sides poised to react to a single imminent move. But also, no doubt, because they may also one day be revolutionised by. Football more than satisfies this requirement. Elite players wear vests that measure heart rate, position, speed and force exerted; team analysts watch hours of footage to tally possession percentages and numbers of passes, shots and goals.
Coaches around the world should be pacing in front of their dugouts in excitement at the news. During a football match’s standard 90 minutes, it is rare to encounter the same situation twice. But corner kicks, which are eminently repeatable, are the focus of hours of specialist training. And doing well in them pays off. Arsenal, sitting at the top of the Premier League when this research paper was published, have scored 13 goals from corners out of a season total of 70.
The model was also capable of using this analysis to suggest new tactics. And, based on ratings from five experts from Liverpool,-generated corner-kick tactics were just as good as those suggested by human coaches. In fact, shown 50 pairs of corners, one real and one with anMr Wang, who confesses he is “no football fan”, says that the sport offers a safe and controllable test bed to develop assistivetechnologies that might one day be used in health care or defence.