Use your head: neuroscience is fast becoming the game changer of football

FYears ago, Arsène Wenger was asked what he thought would be the next game-changer in football. His answer was neuroscience. “Why? Because we are at the end of the improvement in physical speed,” said Wenger. “Over the last ten years the strength and speed of individual players have improved, but now you have sprinters everywhere. The next step will be improving the speed of our brains.”

Neuroscience is the study of the human nervous system, specifically the brain, and all the many connections and interactions that occur within it. It is a branch of science that, in the popular imagination, conjures up images of electrodes and scanners and illuminated parts of the cerebellum. In football it has also become a term that refers to a better understanding of the mental skills and qualities required to succeed in the game.

Not surprisingly, one of the earliest examples of neuroscientific research into footballers was of the more hi-tech variety. In 2014, a group of Japanese researchers put Neymar under an MRI scanner to find out how many neurons – electrical signals that transmit messages throughout the body – were fired by the Brazilian’s brain when he tried a certain exercise. The results showed that he used 90% less than a group of Spanish players from the second division.

In 2017, Wenger was involved in a futuristic initiative when Arsenal’s first team were given virtual reality headsets to train their brains. However, that plan was short-lived after a number of players complained of motion sickness.

In 2024, Wolves head of performance Mat Pearson will limit the amount of time his academy players spend using virtual reality. It’s “usually once a week for 15-20 minutes,” he says. The Premier League club is using virtual reality as a means to test and improve the ‘awareness’ of younger players, by putting them through exercises that mimic matchday experiences.

“It can provide an immersive experience that allows them to view the game from multiple viewpoints and angles to improve and measure their decision-making,” says Pearson. “In general, the best players make the best decisions and they make them faster. Developing this skill can provide a significant benefit.”

What are the components that contribute to good decision-making? For Eric Castien, the speed at which a player can process information is crucial. Castien, the founder of BrainFirstis a former journalist who became intrigued by the possibility of assessing players’ neurological skills after spending time at Barcelona’s academy, La Masia.

“The people who worked there were all convinced that they had the fundamentals of talent clear: that was technical, physical and mental,” says Castien. “When I asked them, ‘Okay, and which of those foundations is the most decisive?’ Then they said, ‘The most decisive thing is something we can’t coach. And that is magic. ”

Castien worked with two Dutch neuroscientists to develop a test that would try to capture some of this magic. A series of games assessing short-term memory function, anticipation and reaction were shared with more than 1,000 professional players across Europe.

“We had Champions League players who performed at the highest level (taking the test),” says Castien. “The question was: what do they share? And what do people who play the same sports at a lower level not share with each other? We found that speed of information processing was one of the clear building blocks of game intelligence.”

This is how Castien explains the importance of information processing for a footballer’s skills. “I went to college and that’s why people traditionally said, ‘He’s a smart guy,’” Castien says. “But if you see me on the football field, playing football at the highest level, I would look very stupid. And that’s because I can absorb a lot of information around me, but processing it takes some time. Not even that much, but a little. And in top sport you don’t have that little time.”

The test is now used by more than 25 clubs, from PSV Eindhoven to Real Sociedad and newly promoted Southampton, as a talent identification tool. Castien argues that a lack of knowledge about a player’s neurological skills, or their potential, is one of the reasons why so many promising footballers never develop a career in football.

“We all know there is a difference between who was good at 15, 16, 17 years old and who will make the adult national team,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s all in the brain, but the lack of knowledge, the lack of insight into the brains of the academy players is part of the dubious conversion race to the academy.”

Castien says he believes the mysteries of the mind surrounding the beautiful game will one day be solved. “If I’m in a good mood, I’d say we’re already halfway there,” he says. But as neuroscience approaches expand within the game, they also amplify techniques that have been around for many years and have in fact gone out of fashion.

“There’s a lot of resistance to repetition and doing the same thing over and over again, but it’s actually very important,” says Holly Bridge, a neuroscientist and academic who is part of a team at the University of Oxford researching “Football in the brain”.

“This idea of ​​muscle memory is clearly not in our muscles,” she says. “What it is is patterns of (neuron) firing in an area of ​​the brain called the cerebellum that helps with all that kind of learning. And essentially, these firing patterns allow us to move in an automatic manner. And every time something goes wrong, we retrain them.

“It’s like a feedback system. You try something, and if it doesn’t work, you say, ‘Okay, what went wrong at that point? Let’s change the connections between those neurons, and then we’ll try again.’ You just go on and on with this process, and… once you learn it, it happens automatically.”

So it turns out that the gray observation that linked David Beckham’s ability to take free kicks to being “the last person on the training pitch” draws a similar conclusion to the results of Neymar’s MRI: a combination of talent and repetitive practice eventually leads to complicated skills becoming instinctive.

Sally Needham’s work is in another area where neuroscience underpins some long-standing coaching behaviors: specifically, the art of putting an arm around a player. Needham works in cognitive neuroscience, a field that studies the interaction of the nervous system with the body and a relationship she summarizes as: “Whatever we think we feel and whatever we feel, we think.”

For example, if a player suffers from anxiety or negative thoughts, that condition can manifest itself physically. “It could be a tight cough, or a high heart rate, or they can feel it in the stomach,” Needham says. It can also affect their fight, flight or freeze response. “But if we start to develop our emotional resilience,” she says, “then our ability to (fall) into that state will be a lot less.”

Needham has spent the past two years working with scientists at the Sheffield United Academy, observing the moments when “players are in the red zone, with limited thinking, limited decision-making, limited scanning and limited non-verbal cues”. She then works with coaches and players to identify these behaviors and create new habits. “Off the field we created resilience, so that when they were on the field, they could deal with things better. And then you have to repeat it, repeat it.”

Despite the repetition, Needham says this generation of academy players is receptive to such an approach. “The children who come in now are different from the children who came before,” she says. “The guys I’ve worked with love the yoga, the coloring, the mindfulness. They understand that emotions and feelings are on this continuum, that there is no right and wrong and that this is actually normal.”

With such a wide range of possible applications, neuroscience could be the game changer Wenger envisioned. But in part that will be because it is the basis for traditional ways of making footballers better at the game they love.

“The best intuitive coaches already get to know the players and know who needs an arm around them, who needs a kick in the butt,” Needham says. But neuroscience “now gives you the backup of why you do what you do – it’s the difference between applying an approach and understanding it.”