Google DeepMind just made its first real-world football club deployment outside of Liverpool FC. TacticAI, the AI tactical assistant originally built for corner kick analysis, is being expanded to handle open-play dynamics, and Palmeiras is the first club in Latin America to build on it. The announcement came at the Google for Brazil 2026 event, timed with the FIFA World Cup kicking off in the country.

Unlike earlier versions of the technology that focused on set pieces like corners and penalties, the new application analyzes the continuous movement of all 22 players during live play. The tool has been refined to process player positioning data and predict how plays will develop up to eight seconds in advance, projecting ball trajectories and player movements from real-time game dynamics.

From dead balls to live chaos

The original TacticAI, published in Nature Communications, was laser-focused on corner kicks. The reasoning was pragmatic: corner kicks are of particular importance because an improvement in their execution can substantially modify game outcomes, they occur frequently (around 10 per match on average), they are taken from a fixed position, and they offer an immediate opportunity for scoring. Set pieces gave the model a controlled environment to learn from.

Open play is a fundamentally harder problem. Existing methods remain constrained to static situations, leaving open-play scenarios that are pivotal to creating attacking advantages largely unexplored. Due to the highly dynamic and long-sequence nature of open play, the potential tactic space grows exponentially as the sequence progresses. The Palmeiras deployment is DeepMind's public signal that they believe the underlying architecture is ready to tackle it.

The graph that sees the pitch

The core of TacticAI is a graph neural network (GNN) where every player on the pitch is a node, and the edges between them encode physical relationships like proximity and team membership. The model then runs