Playing soccer doesn’t just require good muscles and some skill with the ball.The higher the division in which a footballer plays, the greater his cognitive abilities, say researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in a study published in the journalPLoS One.
The investigation, led by Predrag Petrovic, involved 83 footballers – 57 men and 26 women – all classified in the top three national divisions of the Swedish soccer league. The analyzes focused onfunctions related to abstract thinking and reasoning: visual anticipation, pattern recognition, calculation of probabilities in a situation, creativity and strategic decision making. The researchers then compared the results of the high-division footballers with those of the low-division, and then with those of a sample of the general population that was subjected to the same test.
The analyzes showed thatfootballers obtained better scores than the rest of the population, and that the best cognitive abilities occurred in the players who developed their activity in the first division. Specifically, these athletes excelled in a particular area:executive brain function, which implies the mental capacity to solve immediate problems in a creative way, to carry out several tasks at the same time, as well as the precise memory to recall information stored in the past and apply it.
At the moment, the researchers do not know if the individual is “born” with these high cognitive functions or if they develop them in parallel with their physical training.
