2025/11/17 by Siyao Zhao, Zhao, Siyao, Hao Ma +8 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Psychology · #Artificial Intelligence in Games #Counterfactual thinking #Domain (mathematical analysis) #Football #Frame (networking) #Generative grammar #Offensive #Sport Psychology and Performance #Sports Analytics and Performance
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.13326
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2025/11/17 · openalex created_date 2025/11/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Creating offensive advantages during open play is fundamental to football success. However, due to the highly dynamic and long-sequence nature of open play, the potential tactic space grows exponentially as the sequence progresses, making automated tactic discovery extremely challenging. To address this, we propose TacEleven, a generative framework for football open-play tactic discovery developed in close collaboration with domain experts from AJ Auxerre, designed to assist coaches and analysts in tactical decision-making. TacEleven consists of two core components: a language-controlled tactical generator that produces diverse tactical proposals, and a multimodal large language model-based tactical critic that selects the optimal proposal aligned with a high-level stylistic tactical instruction. The two components enables rapid exploration of tactical proposals and discovery of alternative open-play offensive tactics. We evaluate TacEleven across three tasks with progressive tactical complexity: counterfactual exploration, single-step discovery, and multi-step discovery, through both quantitative metrics and a questionnaire-based qualitative assessment. The results show that the TacEleven-discovered tactics exhibit strong realism and tactical creativity, with 52.50% of the multi-step tactical alternatives rated adoptable in real-world elite football scenarios, highlighting the framework's ability to rapidly generate numerous high-quality tactics for complex long-sequence open-play situations. TacEleven demonstrates the potential of creatively leveraging domain data and generative models to advance tactical analysis in sports.