The Seattle Reign have done a complete 180 in the 2025 NWSL season from where they were a year ago. They currently sit in fourth place in the league with 38 points and counting — in 2024, they only managed to get 23 points total. So what changed between then and now? According to head coach Laura Harvey, the strategic use of artificial intelligence is responsible for the Reign's positive surge.
During Harvey's appearance on the “Soccerish” podcast, the longtime manager revealed that she got the idea to make a certain tactical change while tinkering with ChatGPT in her downtime.
“One day in the offseason, I was writing things into ChatGPT like, ‘What is Seattle Reign's identity?'” And it would spurt it out,” Harvey began.
“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. For two teams, it went, ‘You should play a back five.' So I did,” Harvey confessed. “No joke, that's why I did it.”
Harvey has many years of experience under her belt, first serving as the Reign's coach from 2013 to 2017 before returning for her present stint in 2021. She's also been at the helm overseas, leading Arsenal women's football club from 2010 to 2012. But despite her time on the sidelines, adding a back five formation to her club's toolkit had never crossed her mind.
“I'd never really done a lot of research on it,” she continued. “I'd never really, like, 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.”
“It was always sort of talked about as a way to see games out,” Harvey explained. “You know, [you go ahead] and get into a back five and stop people from scoring, [that] was sort of how, like, a back five had been talked about for me.”
Now, Harvey has helped lead the Reign back to a playoff position after they missed the 2024 NWSL postseason last year for the first time since 2017. Seattle has previously won the NWSL Shield three times and the Women's Cup once, but the franchise has never claimed an NWSL title.
The Reign will attempt to clinch their first-ever championship after wrapping up the regular season on Sunday in a possible playoff preview against the third-place Orlando Pride.
