TacEleven: generative tactic discovery for football open play

TL;DR

TacEleven is a novel generative framework that assists football coaches and analysts in discovering diverse, realistic, and high-quality offensive tactics during open play, leveraging multimodal language models and expert collaboration.

Contribution

The paper introduces TacEleven, a pioneering generative system combining tactical proposal generation and selection, tailored for complex football open-play scenarios, with demonstrated effectiveness in real-world tactical exploration.

Findings

52.50% of tactics rated adoptable in real-world scenarios

Effective exploration of complex tactical sequences

Strong realism and tactical creativity in generated tactics

Abstract

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.