AI is changing soccer coaching. Coaches already know it.

Not long ago, Mikel Arteta — manager of Arsenal — and Laura Harvey — head coach of Seattle Reign in the NWSL — publicly admitted to using artificial intelligence in their match preparation. A few weeks later, news broke that Robert Moreno, a Spanish coach at Sochi, had been dismissed because he had relied too heavily on ChatGPT for tactical decisions and travel logistics.

Two very different stories. But together, they tell us something important: AI has arrived in football, and coaches at the highest level are no longer just experimenting with it — they're building it into their workflow.

The traditionalists may object. But the data doesn't lie.

Source: Rivista Undici — "Il prossimo allenatore della tua squadra sarà un'AI"

According to Grand View Research, football is one of the sectors with the greatest interest in AI-based technology development — not just in scouting anymore, but in the individual development of each athlete. And at the 2026 World Cup, Lenovo will launch Football AI Pro, an AI platform for tactical analysis accessible to all 48 qualified nations.

The revolution isn't coming. It's already here.

It's Not Just About Tactics

When people talk about AI in football, they tend to think about match analysis, lineup decisions, opponent scouting. But today's — and especially tomorrow's — coaches carry a much wider set of responsibilities.

They build training plans and manage logistics. They study opponents through video analysis. They process enormous volumes of data collected by their staff. They track player workloads, monitor fatigue, estimate injury risk.

All of these tasks can be made faster, smarter, and more consistent with AI. Not because the coach is replaced — but because the coach gets a collaborator that never forgets, never gets tired, and knows the team inside out.

Barcelona, for example, uses AI integrated with wearable devices to monitor metabolic values in real time — building predictive models for recovery after injury, estimating risk of relapse, and calculating tolerance to specific training loads. Liverpool, under Klopp, collaborated with DeepMind on TacticAI, a tool for set piece analysis.

Meanwhile, Wolfsburg has used AI software to streamline everyday administrative work, and Bochum — following their 2025 relegation — trusted an AI platform to help reconstruct the entire club: players, technical staff, and even the sporting director.

What This Means for Every Coach

These are elite examples. But the logic applies at every level.

The coaches who will thrive in the next decade are not those who resist AI — they're those who learn to use it as an extension of their own methodology. The distinction matters: a generic AI doesn't know your team. It doesn't know your style of play, your players' histories, your seasonal goals, or the specific drills you've been building over the years.

That context is everything. And it's exactly what separates a useful AI tool from a toy.

This is also the foundation of our partnership with Inter Academy. Through YouCoach, Inter can distribute its methodology to its 101 affiliated academies worldwide — via web app and mobile app — so that coaches in Turkey, Brazil, Japan, and the Middle East all work from the same methodological foundation. And with YouCoach AI, coaches at affiliated clubs can now use Inter's own tactical proposals as a starting point to build their training sessions, adapting them to their local context while preserving the identity of the Inter methodology.

The Bottom Line

No one seriously believes AI will replace a football coach. The relationship between a coach and their players — built on trust, communication, presence — is irreplaceable.

But as Rivista Undici puts it clearly: coaches who don't use AI risk being left behind. Not because AI is magic, but because the coaches who do use it will simply be more prepared, more consistent, and more effective.

The question isn't whether to adopt AI. It's which AI actually understands your football.