Former Spain manager, Robert Moreno, was sacked for heavily relying on ChatGPT to make decisions in his team.
Moreno, 48, left Russian First League club FC Sochi last September after picking up just one point from seven matches.
According to the club’s former sporting director Andrei Orlov, Moreno was a big fan of ChatGPT and used it to make some bizarre decisions.
On an away trip to Khabarovsk, Moreno rigidly stuck to the Artificial Intelligence platform’s prompts to plan his team’s schedule.
He ordered his team to train at 7am two days before the match and demanded they stay awake for a continuous period of 28 hours.
In an interview with Sports Russia, Orlov said: “When we were preparing for a trip to Khabarovsk, Robert said, ‘I’ve got it all figured out. I’ve set up all the trip parameters in ChatGPT.’
“I looked at the presentation: it showed that the players weren’t supposed to sleep for 28 hours. I asked, “Robert, that’s all great, but when are the guys going to sleep?
“They (the players) didn’t understand why we had to wake up at five in the morning and train at seven.
“We had Oleg Kozhemyakin on our team, who had played a year for SKA (Khabarovsk) just before Sochi. Moreno didn’t even consult with him.
“In the end, we followed the schedule created by ChatGPT.”
Moreno also depended on ChatGPT to decide on signing a new striker in the summer.
Orlov said: “Last summer, we were looking for a striker, choosing between Vladimir Pisarsky, Pavel Meleshin and Artur Shushenachev.
“Moreno entered the data of Pisarsky, Meleshin, and Shushenachev from Wyscout into ChatGPT. Shushenachev emerged as the best according to GPT.”
Sochi went ahead and signed Shushenachev, who failed to score a single goal in 10 matches.
Orlov added: “An additional tool—why not? But for Moreno, GPT eventually became one of his primary tools.
“Towards the end, the Russian core was very unhappy with Moreno, and the foreigners weren’t so confident in his ideas either.
“He was completely unsympathetic to his assistants and players—people sensed it.”
Under Moreno, Sochi were relegated from the Russian Premier League to the First League.
Moreno managed three games for Spain on an interim basis and was given the permanent job in June 2019 after Luis Enrique resigned due to his daughter’s sickness.
