Football intelligence

It's strange that this piece of research is making the news now...

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0034731

I wonder if Saints supplement the visual analytics effort with design fluency work.

If you aren't interested in the research paper above, here is the sanitised interpretation:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/dec/04/barcelona-andres-iniesta-scope-embrace-brain-game-real-madrid

Of course this is only one paper so how valid a measure is still questionable and open to interpretation. If anyone has more information please add.

Doesn't actually say much (I read both paper and the newspaper guff). Essentially when faced with a number of decisions the sportsman/woman chooses one and seeks to make the optimal. This is stating the obvious. Then they show that they can do so at speed: far faster than the general population. Again, no surprise as given the speed of the game at the level at which they play they are used to working at speed - you can compare this to the reactions test that Hesketh scored well at recently. A lot of it is practise.

It didn't say which players, which positions, ages, etc which could have produced some element of information that is otherwise missing nor did it explain who the normal cohort were and how they had come to be measured. I assume they would have done like they do with other psychometric tests and taken samples from all over but whether these again factor into themselves differentiating factors e.g. age, time test taken, circumstances under which taken and what variance has been allowed for in assessing the degree of validity of the tests therefore.

It does seem to reflect part of what SFC have done (lots of short, blonde clones in the youth team) in that they have not gone for the obvious physical attributes (although I believe that many successful players have been recruited in the opposite fashion) and it was interesting that it was apparently the case that it seemed to have an inverse correlation to IQ to some extent (think Gazza vs e.g. MLT who both would presumably would do well at this test) but it is still the question as to how much of this is learned and whether it is simply the case that football training prepares one to do well at this kind of test.

Generally interesting, though I think the insistence on measuring purely by goals and assists is subject to all kinds of random factors and probably isn't a great indicator of "success" - even in a cohort that's been specifically chosen to be as middling and as consistent as possible. Dunno how else they'd measure success though. Wish I knew more about the specific tests too...

Guessing there's a ton of this kind of stuff being done at the top level to get that competitive advantage.

Thanks for the critique DM, I Haven't had the opportunity to read it yet, only print it for when I can.

The cynic in me suggests that football intelligence might be the ultimate contradiction in terms (winky thing)