Laura Harvey, the head coach at Seattle Reign, has revealed how ChatGPT inspired her to make a key tactical change in the team’s 2025 season.
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Harvey, who won FA WSL manager of the year in 2011 and is currently in her second stint in charge of the Reign, made the admission in an appearance on the Soccerish Podcast.
Seattle has enjoyed a stellar turnaround this season, finishing the year fourth to earn a spot in the playoffs after languishing in second-last in 2024.
An intrigued Harvey said one day in the offseason she started to test out just how accurate and helpful ChatGPT could be, starting by asking broader questions like “what is Seattle Reign’s identity” and “what do you need to do to be successful in the NWSL?”.
“And it would spurt it out,” Harvey explained.
“And I was like ‘I don’t know if that’s true or not’, and then I put in ‘what formation should you play to beat NWSL teams?’ and it spurted out every team in the league and what formation you should play.
“And for two teams, it went ‘you should play a back five.’ So I did. No joke, that’s why I did it.
“It was early in the season and I said to the coaching staff, I’m not joking this is what I did. And they were like, ‘huh, interesting’.”
The Reign played with a back five against Orlando Pride in a 1-0 loss earlier in the year, while Harvey went on to adopt the tactical change at various other points in the season.
Harvey said the suggestion from ChatGPT made her want to look into the back five formation even more, having “never really done a lot of research on it”.
“I’d never really invested into how it could be played in the women’s game. I’d only ever really seen it from afar, you know, watching men’s games really.”
But after the suggestion from ChatGPT, she said the coaching staff “did a deep dive on it”.
“We thought about how we could play it,” she added.
“And we went for it, and we liked it. It worked. We won the game.
“It didn’t tell you how to play it or what to do in it or any of that stuff. It was just like ‘this is what we would say to do’.
“And I was like, ‘alright’. And that was what spurred me to look into it. So then I really looked into it.
“We’ve come in and out of it (the back five). Now we’re quite fluid, we can float in and out of it within games, and I love that.
“When I hear coaches saying, ‘we don’t know what you’re going to do, you’re the hardest team to prepare for, you defend in multiple ways in games’. I’m just like, ‘yes!’ I want everyone to not have a clue what we’re going to do. I think that is amazing.”