Good footballers are quick-witted but not always agreeable

“The question of what makes elite athletes as good as they are has interested scientists for a long time,” says principal investigator Predrag Petrovic, docent at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. “The first thing studied was of course their physical attributes, as elite sportspeople must display strength, speed and stamina, but that’s not the whole story.”

Instead, the research has started to take a greater interest in cognitive faculties and personality traits. The current study shows that elite footballers greatly outperform non-elite controls on executive functions, namely the ability to solve problems in a quickly changing environment. This involves regulating how the brain works in terms of its ability to, for example, plan several steps ahead, inhibit defective behaviours, exercise impulse control and be flexible.

“In soccer, there’s a constant interaction between eleven players on both sides, and the environment changes incredibly fast,” says Dr Petrovic. “Behavioural inhibition, for instance, is something that defenders use when an opponent trying to dribble past them suddenly switches direction. This requires them to instantly inhibit their ongoing behaviour and adjust to the new direction of play so as not to get outmanoeuvred.”

Distinct personality traits

Another distinct difference between elite footballers and the general public is in their personality. The researchers used a five-factor model (the Big Five Inventory) to test the players and control for five different personality traits. 

The elite players were significantly more extrovert, open to new experiences and conscientious than the controls, who, in turn, were significantly more neurotic and agreeable than the players.

“The profiles really stood out,” says Dr Petrovic. “I’ve not had so much to do with personality tests before, but I was surprised by how clear it all was. That the players were more conscientious means that they have self-discipline and work extremely hard to achieve their goals. Being much less agreeable indicates that they go their own way without paying much heed to what other people think.”

The researchers then used artificial neural networking to reverse-analyse the results and showed that the AI model could identify who was an elite player and who was not with 97 per cent accuracy.

Choosing players to invest in

As regards how the results of this study can be used, Dr Petrovic says that for him, it is mainly a way to understand how humans and animals have evolved and adapted to rapidly changing environments where they need to work in groups (e.g. to hunt). In the world of football, he believes that the data can be used by teams to make the best possible use of their players and to choose which ones to invest in.

But for this to be effective, the results from the fully fledged elite players must be transferrable to young, inexperienced players, which cannot be taken for granted.

“If you look at all the research done in the field, it appears as if most of these characteristics are innate, although they can be trained to a small extent,” says Dr Petrovic. “Other studies that have looked at young players are also able to demonstrate similar differences to the normal population. At the same time, what happens, of course, is that the clubs already make their selections, in many cases on the basis of physicality. The biggest and strongest get picked, often those with birthdays early in the year. But if you want another Daniel Chávez, Andrés Iniesta or Lionel Messi, who are all short, technical players, you have to consider the non-physical talents. So I believe using these results to help in player selection would make things fairer.”

The study was done in close collaboration with the Universities of Oxford, Aarhus, Bologna, CQUniversity Australia, and Rio de Janeiro State University. It was financed by grants from numerous bodies, including the Danish National Research Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation and the Nordic Mensa Fund. There are no reported conflicts of interest.

Publication

“Decoding the elite soccer player’s psychological profile”, Leonardo Bonetti, Torbjörn Vestberg, Reza Jafari, Debora Seghezzi, Martin Ingvar, Morten L. Kringelbach, Alberto Goncalves, Predrag Petrovic, PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), online 14 January 2025, doi: 10.1073/pnas.2415126122.