For years now, artificial intelligence (AI) has been creeping into everyday life with the subtlety of a flood. First as a novelty, then as a convenience, and finally as something that sits silently in the corner, watching, calculating, waiting.
In football, a sport already obsessed with marginal gains, the temptation has been irresistible. Data departments have grown faster than academies. Analysts speak in models and probabilities. Coaches scroll through dashboards between sessions. The game has not resisted the future. It has invited it in, offered it a seat, and asked what it knows.
What happened at FC Sochi went several steps further.
This was not a story about using AI as a support tool or a second opinion. This was about surrender. About a manager who mistook access to information for wisdom and treated AI as if it understood the physical and emotional cost of football.
What followed was not innovation; it was chaos, exhaustion, fractured trust, and a club left staring at the trapdoor.
The Growing Fear
The fear of artificial intelligence has been building for years now. Walk into any office, any newsroom, any creative space, and you will find someone quietly wondering if their job might vanish into a server farm somewhere. The question hangs in the air like smoke: can a machine do what I do, but faster, cheaper, better?
In most cases, the honest answer is prolly yes, eventually.
AI can write code, analyze data, generate images, and even write passable prose. It learns quickly. It does not get tired. It does not ask for raises or complain about working conditions.
For the people holding the purse strings, that makes it very attractive.
Football’s New Obsession
Clubs across Europe had spent years racing toward data fluency. Recruitment models grew more sophisticated, and training loads became numbers. Player performance was sliced into thousands of events per match. In this environment, the language of AI started to seep in, often lazily, sometimes dishonestly.
Anything with an algorithm became “AI-driven.” Anything automated sounded futuristic enough to justify decisions.
The fear outside football mirrored the excitement inside it. Jobs were disappearing. Writers, designers, analysts, and administrators watched tools replace tasks that once defined their roles. AI was not always replacing people directly. It was making it easier to sack them.
In effect, the same outcome with better optics.
Football, for all its money and mythology, is not immune to this logic. Owners want efficiency, directors want certainty, and coaches are expected to justify every decision with evidence. Intuition has become unfashionable, even when it works.
Robert Moreno walked straight into this storm.
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The Khabarovsk Disaster
The nightmare started with a trip to Khabarovsk.
If you have never heard of SKA-Khabarovsk, be rest assured the feeling is mutual. The club plays its football in a corner of the world where obscurity comes with the territory, and nobody involved seems particularly bothered by that arrangement..
The club plays in a city perched on the far eastern edge of Russia, about as close to Japan as it is to Moscow. Getting there is not a quick flight; it is an expedition.
Seven time zones. Thousands of miles.
The kind of journey that requires serious planning, the kind where you think about when players sleep, when they eat, how their bodies will adjust to the brutal shift in daylight and routine.
Moreno had staff who understood this. Veterans who had made the trip before, who knew the rhythms of Russian football, who could map out a sensible itinerary that balanced logistics with basic human biology. He could have asked them. He could have trusted his own experience.
Instead, he fed the trip details into ChatGPT and asked it to build a schedule.
What came back was something close to torture. The AI spat out an itinerary that required players to stay awake for 28 consecutive hours. Not because it was cruel, not because it wanted them to suffer. But because it saw the trip as a series of logistical checkpoints, a puzzle to be solved with cold efficiency.
Sleep was not part of the equation, rest was not factored in. AI optimized for time, not for the fragile human bodies trying to perform at the highest level of professional sport.
When Andrei Orlov, the club’s former general director, reviewed the presentation, he asked the kind of question that should never need asking in a football club: “Robert, when are the players supposed to sleep?”
The silence that followed must have been deafening.
Somehow, despite the proposal’s obvious horror, parts of the plan survived. Players were woken at five in the morning for seven o’clock training sessions. They were shuffled through airports and hotels like cargo. The care that separates elite players from mere mortals—the attention to recovery, sleep cycles, and mental freshness—was abandoned in favor of algorithmic efficiency.
You do not need a degree in sports science to know this was madness. You just need to have been tired once in your life.
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The Striker Who Could Not Score
The trip to Khabarovsk was only the beginning. The major damage came later, when Moreno started letting the AI make decisions that actually mattered.
By the summer of 2025, Sochi needed a striker. They had been promoted back to the Russian Premier League and needed someone who could lead the line, someone who could score the goals that would keep them afloat in the top flight. They had three candidates: Vladimir Pisarsky, Pavel Meleshin, and Artur Shushenachev.
Normally, this decision would have involved scouts, video analysts, and lengthy debates over coffee and cigarettes. You would watch the players, and you would talk to people who had worked with them. You would try to figure out not just whether they could finish chances, but whether they had the personality to handle pressure, the hunger to fight when things got tough, the tactical intelligence to fit into your system.
Moreno skipped all of that. He pulled the stats from Wyscout, fed them into ChatGPT, and asked the bot to choose.
Shushenachev, AI said. He is the strongest option.
So, Sochi signed Shushenachev. And then they watched him go ten games without finding the net.
It was not just that he failed to score; it was that he looked lost. As a player dropped into a system he did not understand, playing for a manager who had never evaluated whether he would fit. The fans grew restless, the board grew concerned, and somewhere in his office, Moreno presumably stared at his laptop and wondered where it all went wrong.
The answer, of course, was obvious to everyone except him.
Data can tell you a lot about a player. It can tell you how many touches they take in the box, how often they win aerial duels, and what their expected goals tally looks like over a season. However, it cannot tell you if they have the grit to handle a relegation scrap. It cannot measure heart, or fear, or the tiny mental calculations that separate a good striker from a great one.
AI can analyze thousands of games in seconds; it has never felt the weight of 30,000 people booing. It has never experienced the cold panic of a drought, the desperate scramble for confidence when every shot seems to curl just wide.
It has never had to look a teammate in the eye after missing a sitter and convince them you still believe.
Those things matter. In football, they might matter more than anything else.
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When Everything Falls Apart
By the time the 2025-26 season kicked off, Sochi was a club in crisis.
They had been back in the Premier League for all of a few weeks, and already the wheels were coming off. The rigid schedules, the bizarre training times, the striker who could not score—it all added up to a team that looked broken before they even started.
They took one point from their first seven games. In a league where survival is the only goal that matters, that kind of start is a death sentence.
The dressing room fractured. Reports began filtering out about the Russian players in the squad, the core of the team who were baffled by the schedules and the routines that made no sense.
When a manager loses the locker room, the game is over.
You can have all the data in the world, but if your players do not trust you, do not believe in you, do not think you understand them, then you have nothing.
The end came in September. Sochi lost 2-1 to Spartak Moscow, a game they might have salvaged with a bit of luck or a bit of sense. Instead, Moreno was sent off. A red card, a moment of human frustration, the final indignity in a tenure that had been anything but human.
He was sacked shortly after.
The Denial and the Damage
Now, as January 2026 winds down, the fallout continues. Moreno released an open letter to Marca, the Spanish newspaper, denying everything. He says he never used AI to pick lineups. He says he never lets a chatbot choose his players.
He points to his background in data analysis, his years working with numbers, and his understanding of how technology should be used responsibly. He claims the stories are lies, products of a personal feud with Orlov, nothing more than a smear campaign by people with axes to grind.
Maybe he believes that. Maybe he genuinely thinks the problem was something else, some failure of communication or execution rather than the core idea itself.
However, the table does not lie.
Sochi, under new manager Igor Osinjkin, is dead last. They have won two games all season, and they are 13 points away from safety with time running out.
The damage Moreno inflicted may be beyond repair. This is not a team that lost a few games because of bad luck. This is a team that was systematically dismantled by a manager who forgot what his job actually was.
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What the Numbers Cannot Tell You
The lesson here is not that AI is evil, it is not even that it is useless.
Every major club in world football uses data now. They use algorithms to scout players, to analyze opponents, to optimize training loads. Some of the best managers; Pep Guardiola, Jürgen Klopp, and Mikel Arteta are voracious consumers of information, constantly looking for edges that others might miss.
They use that information to inform decisions, not replace them. They take the data and filter it through years of experience, through an understanding of people and systems, and pressure. They know that a number on a spreadsheet is only as good as the context around it.
Moreno forgot that or maybe he never understood it in the first place. He treated AI like a co-manager, abdicating the responsibility that comes with leadership. He traded intuition for algorithms, empathy for itineraries, wisdom for whatever a chatbot happened to spit out on any given day.
And in doing so, he lost everything.
The Human Game
The human element in football is not some romantic notion, some outdated idea clinging to relevance in a world of GPS vests and expected goals models. It is the foundation.
Players are not variables in an equation. They are people. They get tired. They get scared. They need sleep, and a manager who understands that sometimes the right decision is the one that feels right, even if the numbers say otherwise.
Until an AI can feel the tension in a dressing room before a must-win game, until it can read the fear in a striker’s eyes after a missed penalty, until it can sense when a team needs an arm around the shoulder instead of another tactical lecture, the man in the dugout needs to be exactly that: a HUMAN.
Robert Moreno is not the villain of this story. He is just someone who made a bet that did not pay off. He thought technology could do his job better than he could. He thought AI with access to all the data in the world would make better decisions than a person with messy emotions and incomplete information.
He was wrong.
And now Sochi sits at the bottom of the table, staring at relegation, wondering how it all went so badly wrong. The answer is simple, even if the consequences are not. Football is still a human game. And until that changes, it needs human managers.
