Lionel Messi Coached by ChatGPT
By Cameron W. · Thu, 22 Oct 2026
Lionel Messi has just handed chess a very large audience, and a questionable opening to go with it. On Wednesday, October 21, he posted a chess-themed ChatGPT ad to his 517 million Instagram followers.
Lionel Messi has just handed chess a very large audience, and a questionable opening to go with it. On Wednesday, October 21, he posted a chess-themed ChatGPT ad to his 517 million Instagram followers, and Chess.com reports it passed a million likes and 13,000 comments within a few hours. The chess world has been a lot cooler on the opening itself than the internet has been on the video.
The ad
The clip is simple. Messi tells ChatGPT, in Spanish, that it knows his style and should walk him through a good opening one move at a time. An interactive board shows each move as he follows along, and by the end he is ready to try another variation. His caption sums it up: he asked ChatGPT for an opening that matched his style, and it suggested Goat Horns. The name is a nod to GOAT, the "greatest of all time" label that follows him everywhere.
Who made the ad is less clear. Chess.com does not say, while other outlets describe it as made with OpenAI. That would fit a partnership that began before this year's World Cup, when Messi used ChatGPT to imagine his hair in Argentina's colors. Chess.com also points out that OpenAI released a more visual, interactive version of ChatGPT two weeks before the post.
The opening itself
Goat Horns is not an official opening. The moves are 1.e4 a6 2.d4 c6 for Black, and the first reply is a rare but recognized one, often called the St. George Defence. It is legal and playable. It is also not what strong players would choose, and Chess.com says top players are unlikely to approve of Black's setup. Italy's AGI adds that the a6 move slows Black's development and hands White more of the center. That is a milder verdict than "no grandmaster would touch it", and none of the sources quote a grandmaster directly.
Chess.com also recalls its earlier reporting that AI models often give poor chess advice. Its writer's view is that it hardly matters here. The funny name and Messi's delivery are what people will remember, and Goat Horns might just stick.
A board with a mistake
The demonstration board may have had its own problem. AGI reports that Black's king and queen were swapped, with the queen on e8 and the king on d8, and that fans spotted it quickly and joked about it on social media, including Reddit. AGI says it is unclear whether the AI or the video production was to blame. Chess.com captions one image with the question "Can you spot what's wrong with the position?" but does not answer it, so the swapped pieces rest on the Italian report alone.
The numbers, and a familiar setting
Engagement figures differ between outlets. Chess.com gives more than a million likes and 13,000 comments within a few hours, while AGI reports nearly two million likes and more than 18,000 comments in the first hours, so the count may simply have kept climbing. Messi is the second most followed person on Instagram, behind Cristiano Ronaldo.
This is not his first chess moment in advertising. In 2022, he and Ronaldo appeared in a Louis Vuitton campaign photographed by Annie Leibovitz, playing chess, and fans matched the board to a 2017 Norway Chess game between Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura. Messi and OpenAI have not commented beyond the post itself in anything found.
