Spanish manager has been appointed South Korea’s interim head coach following a disastrous World Cup campaign.
Published On 14 Sep 202614 Sep 2026
South Korea’s new interim football coach Robert Moreno has denied allegations that he relied on artificial intelligence during his last coaching role but admitted to using technology in his work.
Addressing his first news conference as the Taegeuk Warriors’ temporary coach on Monday, Moreno promised to make South Korean football fans “happy”.
The Spaniard was appointed as the Asian giants’ temporary coach following a disastrous few months for the team and the country’s football federation, during which on-field results and off-field controversies left the fans bitterly disappointed.
Moreno, who was forced to deny earlier this year that he used ChatGPT to prepare for games, will be in charge for friendly matches in the coming months.
He addressed allegations that he used artificial intelligence during his time in charge of Russian club Sochi, saying “It was a piece of news that is completely false and went viral.”
Moreno left the top-flight side in September 2025 after a poor run of results, and reports said he had heavily relied on ChatGPT in his role, even using it to decide between potential signings.
“Obviously, I use technology,” he said.
“Anyone who spends 10 minutes looking into it can see that everything has been taken out of context and put together to cause harm.”
The Korea Football Association (KFA) said Moreno could stay on for the Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia in January-February, “subject to an evaluation”.
Moreno named captain Son Heung-min in his squad for four upcoming home friendlies and said he wanted to put a smile back on South Korean fans’ faces.
“We’re going to try to do our work honestly and with the aim of making all Korean football fans happy,” said the 48-year-old, who is the first Spaniard to coach South Korea.
“Good matches, and trying to help the players.”
Moreno will lead the team against Ecuador and Uruguay in September and Venezuela and Uzbekistan in October.
South Korea had been without a coach since Hong Myung-bo quit following their shock group-stage exit from the World Cup in North America in June.
Son Heung-min led the South Korean team that was ousted from the FIFA World Cup in the group stage [File: Raquel Cunha/Reuters]
Hong’s departure did little to quell public outrage over the disappointing campaign and added fuel to pre-existing questions about how he was hired.
Police raided KFA headquarters last month as part of an investigation into Hong’s 2024 appointment.
The KFA also apologised for allegations that it provided sexual entertainment for foreign referees.
Moreno named striker Son, now in the United States’ Major League Soccer with Los Angeles FC, in his first squad along with Atletico Madrid’s Lee Kang-in and Bayern Munich’s Kim Min-jae.
Hong’s decision to leave Son on the bench in the first half of the decisive match against South Africa at the World Cup baffled and angered many supporters.
“We’re all aware of Son’s versatility,” said Moreno.
Mike Trout was practically beaming. He dropped the phrase “fresh start” four times in an interview that barely lasted five minutes.
The burden of the Angels’ failures has been disproportionately his to bear. He has insisted that his path to Cooperstown would run through Anaheim and only Anaheim. He has played 16 seasons for an owner that blessed him with half a billion dollars, treated his family like royalty and stranded him in position to conclude a star-spangled career without ever winning a postseason game.
“What a track record,” Trout said. “Wherever he buys, he wins.”
Rams owner Stan Kroenke has agreed to purchase a majority stake of the Angels on Tuesday. The deal is pending regulatory review and MLB approval.
(Kyusung Gong / Associated Press)
The Rams. The Colorado Avalanche. The Denver Nuggets. Arsenal.
So what if the Angels have baseball’s longest playoff drought? They now have baseball’s richest owner, with a net worth valued by Forbes at $24 billion.
Kroenke bought a controlling share of the Angels at a valuation of $4 billion, a record for a major league team, with current owner Arte Moreno retaining a small stake, a source with knowledge of the deal not authorized to discuss it publicly told The Times. The sale includes the team-owned television and radio outlets, ABTV and AM 830. The deal is subject to customary closing conditions and MLB approval.
In 2009, ESPN put Moreno on the cover of its magazine, proclaiming the Angels delivered the best value of the then-122 teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball. In this decade, the experience had been so devalued by 12 consecutive losing seasons that resale tickets for Tuesday’s game against the mighty New York Yankees were available for $5, amid a season of fans regularly chanting “Sell the Team!”
“He’s aware of the chants,” Angels president Molly Jolly said. “He knows about them. At the end of the day, this is about having the right next owner more than it is about anything else.”
Jolly wouldn’t say whether Kroenke or Moreno initiated the negotiations. She did say the sale was not conducted through a formal bidding process, but proceeded through face-to-face discussions between Kroenke and Moreno.
“He has a traditional sense about him,” Jolly said. “To be able to sit down with another gentleman and have a conversation and talk about baseball and the franchise, that resonates for how he thinks and looks at things, rather than it being a complex conversation.
“I think that’s what was the ‘Why now?’ It was the right person having the right conversation with him.”
As far as she knew, Jolly said, the conversations had not started when she assumed the team presidency in April, but the possibility of a sale had “always stayed out there” after Moreno invited bids in 2022 and then decided not to sell.
In July, after joining the Angels as interim general manager, John Mozeliak said he had spoken with Moreno for hours and the topic of whether the owner might sell the team “never came up.” On Tuesday, Mozeliak acknowledged that, when he started his position, Moreno “had mentioned that this was a possibility.”
Fans at Angel Stadium hold up signs during a game against the Yankees Tuesday marking Stan Kroenke’s agreement to purchase the Angels from Arte Moreno.
(Mark J. Terrill / Ap Photo/mark J. Terrill)
The sale is not expected to be finalized until early next year. Kroenke has not done the usual due diligence that would precede a sale — meeting with team management and touring the stadium — and has not introduced himself to officials from the city of Anaheim. The city owns the stadium and surrounding parking lots, a 150-acre site that city officials would love to see Kroenke develop.
In the meantime, it’s business as usual for the Angels. Mozeliak, who ran the St. Louis Cardinals when the Rams played in St. Louis, said he never has met Kroenke. He did recall speaking with Kevin Demoff, who oversees all of Kroenke’s teams.
Mozeliak has no idea whether Kroenke might invite him to stay, but for now the plan of rebuilding the team and reorganizing the front office remains on course, in the interest of serving fans weary and frustrated after 12 consecutive losing seasons.
“We’ve been preaching change all along,” Mozeliak said. “Now they’re going to see even more.”
And, he noted, the Padres and Angels had sold at successive record prices for MLB teams, despite the prospect of a lockout and owners’ hopes for a new collective bargaining agreement with a salary cap intended in part to raise franchise values.
“A lot of people thought teams wouldn’t sell until there was a new CBA,” Mozeliak said. “Clearly, that prediction was wrong.”
In the clubhouse, no one was talking about that. Neto was talking about the call Trout made to “some of the Rams guys” for a scouting report on Kroenke.
“I reached out to one Rams player,” Trout said, smiling. “He exaggerates a little bit.”
Still, given the national attention given last winter to the air conditioning not working properly in an Angel Stadium weight room, Neto said the evaluation from the Rams’ locker room was glowing.
“The most important thing they said is, he just wants what’s important for us,” Neto said. “That’s to make the clubhouse better, in the sense of whatever we need, we get, whether that’s amenity-wise, speakers, whatever it is, he’ll make sure we get those.”
Trout was so enthusiastic that, when a reporter asked if he was excited about what the new vision might be, he answered before the reporter could finish asking the question.
“No doubt,” Trout said. “Obviously, when you’re frustrated the last — I don’t know how many years it’s been, but to hear the news like this, I’m super excited to have this change.”
For his part, Neto sounded ready to pitch Tarik Skubal on pitching for the Angels — or, at least, pitching Kroenke on the possibility of recruiting him in free agency.
“Who doesn’t want to be in Southern California?” Neto said. “The weather is beautiful here. We have the best fans, in my opinion. We have a beautiful stadium.
“Who wouldn’t want to be here and play in this organization, in this market? It would be a no-brainer.”
Trout said the ownership change “was needed” and said there was “a good vibe around the clubhouse,” but both he and Neto expressed appreciation for Moreno.
“Arte was very supportive of us, whatever the outside noise was,” Neto said.
“I’ve seen a lot of hate, a lot of love, a lot more hate. But, as a player who has played under him, it was a lot of love. He treated us well, and that’s all you can ask for as a player.”
Texts lit up my phone this morning from friends who had wasted most of their lives rooting for the Angels: Arte Moreno finally was selling the team.
“First order of business: it’s the Anacrime Angels,” Nelson Rodriguez cracked before sending a meme of Stringer Bell in “The Wire” wearing an old-school California Angels cap and saying, “I want you to put the word out there that we back up.”
“This news honestly made my year,” texted Anaheim City Councilmember Natalie Rubalcava, who graduated a year ahead of me from Anaheim High and whose daughter works at my wife’s restaurant. “Excited to leave the controversy and negativity behind and look forward to a new era of Anaheim baseball.”
“Shame this didn’t happen when [Shohei] Ohtani was an Angel,” the Mountain shared on a group text thread of childhood friends who call each other by long-standing nicknames — I’m the Consigliere.
“I get invited to the games but hell no,” replied the Butcher, who’s been a fan since the days of Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan in the 1970s.
“I’ll finally go back” to a game in person, my cousin Plas added. “A Trumper [Latino] what could’ve gone wrong …” he wrote, referencing Moreno, before asking if Kurt Suzuki was still manager because “that’s how little I’ve kept up with the team.”
Those are the texts I can print in a family newspaper.
Moreno is selling to Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke, whose company also owns perennial contenders in the NBA (Denver Nuggets), NHL (Colorado Avalanche) and England’s Premier League (Arsenal). Sources told my colleagues that the price was $4 billion, which would be a baseball record and speaks to the Halos’ untapped potential.
Major League Baseball still needs to approve the deal, but I guarantee that Commissioner Rob Manfred and the 29 other team owners are reacting with the silly swaying dance that Dodgers players do every time they get on base.
“The Moreno Family has been honored to steward the Angels for 23 years,” the soon-to-be-ex-Angels owner said in a statement.
You stewarded nada, Arte: You destroyed.
You started with so much hope and ended up with fans like my friends shooting venom at you like pissed-off cobras. There’s a reason why you’ll leave as one of the most loathed owners in baseball history. Your underperforming reign makes the McCourts of Dodgers infamy seem as amazing and beloved as the O’Malleys.
Not even Shohei Ohtani, at spring training when he played for the Angels in 2023, could change the team’s fortunes under Moreno.
(Morry Gash/Associated Press)
The Tucson native, who made his billions in the billboard industry, bought the Angels from Disney in 2003, the year after they won their sole World Series championship. At a festive press conference, Moreno handed a sombrero to then-skipper Mike Scioscia to wear, then announced that the first order of business was to cut beer prices.
The new owner quickly signed the best players in baseball — slugger Vladimir Guerrero and pitcher Bartolo Colón. Moreno walked Angel Stadium during games to ask fans what they wanted, what they needed, what they dreamed of. That first decade, he made the Angels what they never had been for a prolonged period: winners.
Fans packed the stands — more than 3 million each year from 2003 to 2019, the third-longest streak in baseball. Anaheimers donned Halos jerseys and hats like never before. More incredibly, Moreno was at the cusp of the impossible: convincing a generation of Latino baseball fans in Orange County to side with the Halos instead of the Dodgers.
But there were always signs that something was off.
Moreno renamed the team the Los Angeles Angels two years after he bought them, a ridiculous moniker that made them a national punchline. The renaming also cost Anaheim millions of dollars in legal fees after the city unsuccessfully sued to force Moreno to keep my hometown in the team’s name.
Moreno openly talked about moving the Angels to a city that would build him a new stadium. He also fell into the terrible habit of signing conservative-leaning, past-their-prime ballplayers like Josh Hamilton, Albert Pujols and Anthony Rendon to massive contracts that weighed down the team for years, like one of Angel Stadium’s legendary cinnamon rolls.
Die-hards like my pals trudged on, buoyed by generational talent Mike Trout and the occasional flash-in-the-pan prospect. But even they were turned off by the last three years.
That same year, the Halos let Ohtani — who was on his way to a second most valuable player award and already had established himself as one of the most talented baseball players ever — walk away as a free agent while gaining nothing in return.
This season kicked off with Moreno telling the Orange County Register about a survey supposedly revealing that winning wasn’t “a top priority” for Angels fans. The Angels hadn’t made the playoffs in 11 years, hadn’t finished with a winning record since 2015, had landed in last place in their division for the last two years — and that’s what he offered as a speck of hope? No wonder the team is on pace to lose 100 games for the first time in franchise history. No wonder disgusted fans have protested both inside and outside Angel Stadium all summer.
At the only game I went to this year — a sparsely attended afternoon snoozer against the Chicago White Sox — I found the stadium more beat-up than ever: peeling paint, beat-up seats, tinny PA system. For about $25 each, my friends and I bought tickets behind the first-base dugout that would have cost hundreds of dollars at Dodger Stadium.
Billboards along Southern California freeways have broadcast the Angels’ desperate attempts to draw in fans via pathetic promotions. Fireworks every Saturday. A bobblehead giveaway of light-hitting shortstop Zach Neto, who never has made an All-Star team. A “yard sale” that sounds like a giant casting off of crappy memorabilia a week away from the trash can.
Angels fans wave signs and urge owner Arte Moreno to sell the team to an ownership group willing to invest more in winning during a pregame protest at Angel Stadium.
(Joaquin Ruiz / For The Times)
I never cared for the Angels, but I always wanted them to do well. Any success they achieved rubbed off on my hometown, as it did during that magical 2002 run.
I also wanted Moreno, the first Latino to own a major professional sports team, to succeed, so his fellow Trump supporters might know that our kind can excel at the highest echelons of American society, if only we get the chance.
But for the last few years, I cheered each time the Angels lost. I wanted them to tank, to forever seal Moreno’s legacy as a loser. To serve as a warning to all professional sports owners that they can abuse a host city and its fan base for only so long before people revolt by just not caring.
Good luck to Kroenke as he tries to resuscitate a franchise deader than a stump in the Petrified Forest.
The words “Anaheim Angels” are now enshrined in California law.
Whether the baseball team that calls Angel Stadium home reverts to its hometown name remains to be seen. On Thursday, however, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the “Home Run for Anaheim Act,” a step that elected officials in Orange County consider a significant step in that direction.
The new law, introduced by Assemblyman Avelino Valencia (D-Anaheim), cleared the state legislature without a single vote against it.
The law does not mandate the Angels — playing under a Los Angeles name in Anaheim’s city-owned stadium — revert to the Anaheim Angels name.
For now, in fact, the law does absolutely nothing. On Friday, the Los Angeles Angels play at Angel Stadium.
Instead, the law provides the city with an incentive to dangle before the team. If the Angels — whether under current owner Arte Moreno or a future owner — wish to develop the 150-acre Angel Stadium property, state law would prioritize affordable housing within the site.
In an era where team owners covet the profits from development around stadiums and arenas — including places for fans to eat, drink and shop 365 days a year, not just on game days — the city of Anaheim could seek an exemption from the affordable housing law. That wouldn’t rule out housing on the site, but it would give a team more flexibility to build whatever project might be considered most profitable.
If the city obtains the exemption, the new law says, “then any materials, including, but not limited to, a lease, deed of sale, and promotional or marketing materials, shall refer to that team as the Anaheim Angels.”
Moreno has twice reached deals with the city to develop the land, only to see the city walk away both times. In the last deal, he rejected the city’s request to rename the team the Anaheim Angels.
“We are proud to call Angel Stadium of Anaheim our home,” Angels spokeswoman Marie Garvey said, “and any other comment about the future would be premature.”
Moreno, 80, has shown no public interest in a third negotiation with the city. The Angels’ current stadium lease extends through 2032, and the team has options to extend the lease through 2038.
By year’s end, the city has said it anticipates the release of a long-awaited property assessment, which is expected to show Angel Stadium needs hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades to remain viable for the long-term. The city and team may not agree on who should pay for them, and real estate development around the stadium could be part of the solution for funding a new or renovated stadium.
The city could use the exemption as leverage in discussions with Moreno or a new owner, although leverage could work both ways.
When Anaheim sued the Angels over the 2005 name change, city-commissioned experts testified in court that the Anaheim name was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the city over the life of the lease. That could compel an owner to ask the city to contribute to the cost of building a new stadium in exchange for the return of the Anaheim name.
An almost vacant large urban site — an aging stadium surrounded by 130 acres of parking lots, sitting between three freeways and a train station — is rare in Southern California and surely would attract development interest among potential bidders for the Angels.
But any new owner would have one more bit of leverage: Once the Angel Stadium lease expires, the owner would be free to move out of Anaheim.
