TacSIm: A Dataset and Benchmark for Football Tactical Style Imitation

Current football imitation research primarily aims to optimize reward-based objectives, such as goals scored or win rate proxies, paying less attention to accurately replicating real-world team tactical behaviors. We introduce TacSIm, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for Tactical Style Imitation in football. TacSIm imitates the acitons of all 11 players in one team in the given broadcast footage of Premier League matches under a single broadcast view. Under a offensive or defensive broadcast footage, TacSIm projects the beginning positions and actions of all 22 players from both sides onto a standard pitch coordinate system. TacSIm offers an explicit style imitation task and evaluation protocols. Tactics style imitation is measured by using spatial occupancy similarity and movement vector similarity in defined time, supporting the evaluation of spatial and temporal similarities for one team. We run multiple baseline methods in a unified virtual environment to generate full-team behaviors, enabling both quantitative and visual assessment of tactical coordination. By using unified data and metrics from broadcast to simulation, TacSIm establishes a rigorous benchmark for measuring and modeling style-aligned tactical imitation task in football. The benchmark will be soon public.