Elite Footballers' Cognitive Abilities Featured in Major Swedish Newspaper

One of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), recently published an article highlighting groundbreaking research on the cognitive abilities of elite football players. The study, led by Capacio’s co-founder Predrag Petrovic and Torbjörn Vestberg from Karolinska Institute, along with colleagues from universities in England, Denmark, Italy, and Brazil, reveals fascinating insights into what makes top footballers excel.

The research team conducted extensive testing on 204 elite players from top teams in Brazil and Sweden, comparing them to a control group of similar age and education level. Their findings demonstrate that elite footballers possess exceptional executive functions – the brain’s ability to plan, maintain attention, and quickly shift focus when needed.

“After extensive tests, elite players proved to be better at advanced planning and have greater cognitive flexibility than those in the control group. The results are striking,” says brain researcher Predrag Petrovic.

The study revealed that top footballers display several distinctive traits:

• Superior working memory and rare creative abilities
• Advanced planning capabilities and exceptional cognitive flexibility
• More conscientious and meticulous in their actions compared to the general population
• More extroverted and more open to new experiences
• Greater mental toughness and ability to maintain attention under pressure

For the first time, researchers employed artificial intelligence to identify the cognitive profiles of elite players. Remarkably, the AI could identify individuals with sufficient executive capacity to play at the highest elite level with almost 100% accuracy.

Leonardo Bonetti from Oxford University explains: “Many dream of becoming top-level football players, but only a few succeed. We wanted to find out what makes elite footballers so special and what drives their success. In recent years, cognitive abilities – how the brain functions – have emerged as an explanatory factor. Our results not only confirm this but add new knowledge.”

The study confirmed that legendary players like Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández possessed exceptionally high levels of executive functions, which helped make them an unstoppable midfield pair at Barcelona.

The researchers believe their findings have broader applications:

“Employers generally have poor knowledge of how their employees function and react in different situations,” says Torbjörn Vestberg. “Increased knowledge about the importance of executive functions can lead to better collaboration and better results in all workplaces.”

While these executive functions are largely innate and difficult to improve, Vestberg suggests we can regulate our emotions through breathing techniques and physical exercise to reduce stress hormones, thereby gaining better access to our mental capacity and executive functions.

The study “Decoding the elite soccer player’s psychological profile” was published by PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) late last year.

Read the full article (in Swedish) at Svenska Dagbladet.