Using your head: neuroscience is fast becoming football’s gamechanger

Four years 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 of physical speed,” Wenger said. “In the last 10 years, the power and speed of individual players has improved, but now you have sprinters everywhere. The next step will be to improve the speed of our brains.”

Neuroscience is the study of the human nervous system, particularly the brain, and all the multitudinous connections and interactions that go on within it. It is a branch of science that, in the popular imagination, summons up images of electrodes and scanners and illuminated sections of the cerebellum. In football, it has also become a term to refer to a better understanding of the mental skills and qualities necessary to succeed in the game.

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It’s not surprising that one of the first instances of the neuroscientific study of footballers was of the more hi-tech kind. In 2014 a group of Japanese researchers put Neymar under an MRI scanner to find out how many neurons – electrical signals that convey messages around the body – were fired off by the Brazilian’s brain when he attempted a given exercise. The results found he used 90% fewer than a group of Spanish second division players.

In 2017, Wenger was involved in a futuristic initiative when the Arsenal first team were given virtual-reality headsets to help train their brains. That scheme was short-lived, however, after a number of players complained of experiencing motion sickness.

In 2024, Mat Pearson, the head of performance at Wolves, limits the amount of time his academy players spend using virtual reality. It is “usually once a week for 15-20 minutes”, he says. The Premier League club use virtual reality as a means of testing and improving the “awareness” of younger players, putting them through exercises that recreate match experiences.

“It can provide an immersive experience that allows them to see the game from multiple viewpoints and angles to enhance and measure their decision-making,” says Pearson. “Generally the best players make the best decisions and make them quicker. By developing this skill, it can have a significant benefit.”

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

“The people working there were all convinced that they had the fundamentals of talent clear: that was technical, physical and mental,” Castien says. “When I asked them: ‘OK, and which one of those fundamentals is the most decisive?’ then they said: ‘The most decisive is something we cannot coach. And that is magic.’”

Castien collaborated with two Dutch neuroscientists to develop a test that would attempt to capture some of this magic. A series of games that assessed working on short-term memory, anticipation and reaction was shared with more than 1,000 professional players across Europe.

“We had Champions League players performing at the highest level [taking the test],” Castien says. “The question was: what do they share? And brain-wise, what do people playing the same sports at a lower level not share? We found that the speed of information processing was one of the clear building blocks of game intelligence.”

This is how Castien breaks down the importance of information processing to a footballer’s skill set. “I went to university and so, traditionally, people would say: ‘He’s a smart guy,’” Castien says. “But if you look at me at the football pitch, playing football at the highest level, then I would look very stupid. And that’s because I can catch a lot of information around me, but to process it, that takes a little time. Not even that much, but a little. And in elite sports, 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 tool for talent identification. Castien argues that a lack of knowledge around a player’s neurological ability, or of their potential, is one of the reasons why so many promising footballers never go on to develop a career in the game.

“We all know there’s a difference between who was good at 15, 16, 17 years old and who will make it to the adult national team,” he says. “I don’t say that it’s all because of the brain, but the lack of knowledge, the lack of insights into the brains of the academy players, is part of the doubtful academy conversion race.”

Castien says he believes the mysteries of the brain in relation to the beautiful game will one day be worked out. “If I’m in a good mood, then I would say we were halfway,” he says. But as neuroscientific approaches expand within the game, they are also reinforcing techniques that have been in place for many years and may, in fact, have even become unfashionable.

“There’s lots of pushback against repetition and doing the same thing over and over again, but actually it’s really important,” says Holly Bridge, a neuroscientist and academic who is part of a team at the University of Oxford looking at “Football on the brain”.

“This idea of muscle memory, it’s obviously not in our muscles,” she says. “What it is, is patterns of [neuron] firing in an area of the brain called the cerebellum which helps with all that type of learning. And essentially, those patterns of firing allow us to move in an automatic way. And every time something goes wrong, we retrain them.

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

So it turns out the hoary observation that linked David Beckham’s ability at free-kicks to his 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 a complicated skill becoming instinctive.

Sally Needham’s work is in another area where neuroscience is substantiating some longstanding coaching behaviours: specifically, the art of putting an arm around a player. Needham works in cognitive neuroscience, a field studying how the nervous system interacts with the body and a relationship she summarises as: “Whatever we think we feel and whatever we feel we think.”

If a player suffers from anxiety or negative thoughts, say, that condition can manifest physically. “It could be a tight cough, or a high heart rate or they’re feeling it in the stomach,” Needham says. It might also affect their fight, flight or freeze response. “But if we start to develop our emotional resilience,” she says, “then our capacity to [fall] into that state will be a lot less.”

Needham has spent the past two years working with scholars at the Sheffield United academy, observing the moments where “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 behaviours and create new habits. “Off the pitch we were generating resilience so that when they were on the pitch, they could cope with things better. And then you’ve got to repeat that, repeat that.”

Despite the repetition, Needham says this generation of academy players are receptive to such an approach. “The children that are coming through now are different to those that came before,” she says. “The boys that I have worked with, they love the yoga, they love the colouring in, they love the mindfulness. They understand that emotions and feelings are on this continuum, that there’s no good and bad and that, actually, this is normal.”

With such a broad range of possible applications, neuroscience may well turn out to be the gamechanger Wenger envisaged. But in part it will be because it underpins traditional means of making footballers better at the game they love.

“The best intuitive coaches already get to know the players and they know who needs an arm around them, who needs a kick up the backside,” 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”.