New research into professional soccer players finds they score well above average on tests of memory, planning and problem-solving
It turns out the widely held cliché of the stupid soccer player might be way off the mark according to a new study. Researchers looked at the psychological profiles of elite soccer players and discovered that success on the field goes beyond physical ability. The review, which featured 328 players, including 204 elite soccer players from the top teams in Brazil and Sweden, found that elite players have exceptional cognitive abilities, including improved planning, memory, and decision-making skills.
Dr Leonardo Bonetti is Associate Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark and Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry. He is also the co-author of the report and he joined the Drivetime show on RTÉ Radio 1 to discuss its findings. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full below starting at 24.26 minutes).
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"We wanted to identify what was the ideal profile of the elite football player", explains Bonetti, "and we wanted to study both cognitive abilities and personality traits. We found out that these elite football players were extremely clever so they had very high cognitive abilities, and also a very specific set of personality traits.
"They had these very high levels of executive functions, high levels of planning and ability of solving logical problems, and also very high levels of working memory. Essentially, they were very good at this whole cognitive spectrum."
Bonetti believes such functions would also be useful away from the football pitch. "This is something that would most likely work across many different fields when it comes to achieving the position of success. It worked for football players, but it might also work in different scenarios where perhaps people are asked to do something rather different."
What kind of tests did the researchers carry out to assess intelligence? "We used these executive functions where people were asked essentially to join some different dots and follow some specific rules and be very fast at doing that. We also had memory tests, where players were presented with a series of numbers, for instance, and they had to repeat it either in the same order or in a reverse order.
"They also had to solve some more complex, logical problems. For instance, they had a limited number of moves to move some different stones from one tower to another tower. What was really interesting is that we essentially found much higher abilities across the whole spectrum of cognitive abilities."
The study also found players had higher levels of extroversion and much lower levels of agreeableness. "Cognitive ability tells is about the potential people have to solve problems, but personality is very important to understand how people interact with the environment. Football players had a very high level of extroversion, and also were more conscientious. Most likely, they were more prone to train more, but they were also not necessarily very agreeable. I would say elite football players are not necessarily the kindest people in the world."
Since we are exposed to football players primarily through their interviews, that's why we might think that they're not very clever.
So why does Bonetti think footballers are sometimes stereotypically seen as thick? "I think that that might be related to two factors. One is that we didn't study was verbal intelligence, the ability of expressing yourself or concepts through words, but we started this performance matrix of intelligence instead. It might be that this verbal intelligence might be actually not higher in elite football players, and that might be the case why. Since we are exposed to football players primarily through their interviews, that's why we might think that they're not very clever.
"At the same time, they are not necessarily very highly educated. If you are a football player, you don't necessarily want to study at the university or get degrees so you might not be very knowledgeable about facts. Sometimes I think we confound being knowledgeable about something with being clever."
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
