February 7, 20254 min readProfessional Soccer Players May Demonstrate Exceptional Cognitive ControlTop soccer players demonstrate superlative cognitive abilities for strategizing and situational awarenessBy Christiane Gelitz & Gary Stix edited by Dean Visser Andreyuu/Getty ImagesSoccer fans sometimes imagine that they themselves could potentially perform at the highest levels of the sport, just like the athletic heroes they watch on the pitch. But if they ever do find the chance to try, they will learn that their body simply wont cooperateand they might even get seriously hurt.And many of them are ignoring the fact that the beautiful game is also a brain game. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, an international research group says it has now confirmed that success on the soccer field is about mind as well as body. The team, co-led by Leonardo Bonetti of Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Oxford, examined elite soccer players intelligence and personality types and discovered they have exceptional cognitive abilitiesas well as a typical psychological profile.The participants comprised more than 200 professional players from Brazil and Sweden, about 9 percent of whom were women, along with a control group of 124 Brazilian nonathletes with a similar education level and social background. The subjects filled out a personality questionnaire and completed several cognitive tests. The researchers compared the results for the athletes with the same measures in the control group and the general population.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Among other things, the professional players demonstrated a better working memory and showed better performance in planning and problem-solving. But above all, they really shined when it came to executive functionthe regulation of information processing in higher-order brain areas that helps someone adapt to fast-changing events. In particular, the elite athletes performed far above the norm on the design fluency test, a measure of cognitive flexibility.The design fluency test had proved to be a good marker of intelligence on the soccer field in previous studies, with higher scores indicating players who had superior skills in developing strategy and analyzing the play around them. The ability to plan several steps ahead in order to reach a goal in a quickly changing environment may be one of the most crucial cognitive processes related to successful behavior in complex ball sports such as soccer, Bonetti and his colleagues write in their new paper.In the personality test, the professional athletes also demonstrated pronounced self-discipline, energy, extraversion and other factorsall unsurprising results. But at first glance, one thing did not fit the picture of success in a team sport: the players were assessed to be less sociable and cooperative than other people, perhaps because they were so focused on their own performance.Other studies had previously shown that professional soccer players have a unique cognitive profilebut these investigations had smaller samples that often did not include top players. Our novel study reproduced previous results but can also be regarded as the first conclusive study, says Predrag Petrovic, co-senior author of the new paper and a senior lecturer of clinical neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. (Elite players demonstrate cognitive skills above the norm. But the nature of the game can compromise those superior abilities. The frequent heading of the ball and the collisions with other players can lead to head injuries that put players at higher risk for dementia.)Denis Hauw, a professor of sports psychology at the University of Lausanne's Institute for Sports Science who did not participate in the research, says the "study provides results that complement and offer a structure to the scattered findings that tried to explain the psychological factors linked to elite sport performances."Another researcher found the research to be unconvincing. Jaap Oosterlaan, a professor of pediatric neurosciences at the Vrije Universiteit and Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands who was not involved with the research, says the study mirrors earlier findings on the cognitive abilities of athletes, while exploring machine learning techniques to assess differences in elite players and a control group. The AI system was able to reproduce comparable results to classical statistical tests, Oosterlan says, but the analysis performed by the system was unable to establish credibly that cognitive abilities or personality characteristics were related to the superior performance of the elite players. Moreover, the differences between elite players and non-athletes could have been due to the effects of physical training on the top players brain functioning and not to innate abilities that existed before the elite player started playing soccer."Soccer may be the worlds most popular sport, but Petrovic notes that superior cognitive skills might be found in some players of other sports if they are studiedfor example, quarterbacks and running backs in American football and top basketball players. That is best exemplified in Nikola Jokić [of the Denver Nuggets], who I dream of testing at some point, he says.In conducting the study, the team used an artificial intelligence system to find patterns in the test scores that could be used to evaluate cognitive and personality characteristicsand it separated the elite athletes from the nonathletes in the control group with 97 percent accuracy. I predict that such cognitive measures will be used everywhere in professional [soccer] within 10 years for finding novel players, [for] strategically using the players on a team, and for coaching the team and individuals based on cognitive profiles, Petrovic says.The AI did, however, misidentify some nonathletes as players; in pinning down the relevant cognitive and personality attributes, such a system can overlook other key qualities. There are certainly people in the general population who exhibit the right cognitive profile. But to ascend to the elite ranks in soccer, you have to have the right physical prerequisites in addition to the right mental ones. And when you go out on the pitch, the motivation needs to be there: you have to really want it.This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.