Footballers are highly intelligent

Swedish researchers have concluded that professional footballers are considerably more intelligent than they are given credit for.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute In Stockholm analysed the cognitive performance of footballers in Sweden's top flight as well as a lower league and concluded that the players who scored most highly in the test tended to score the most goals.

In addition, top division footballers outperformed lower division ones and footballers as a whole were in the top two percentile for the population by this measure.The measure the scientists used was broader than IQ, taking into account the players' creativity, cognitive flexibility, working memory and processing speed.

One of the scientists involved in the study, Torbjõrn Vestberg, was not surprised by the findings.
"To be a footballer you must have physical ability and speed," he said. "But that doesn't help if you don't have a brain that knows what to do."

So where does the perception that footballers are unintelligent come from? Vestberg thinks he knows the answer."They are not stupid. They are very clever. But they start to play soccer when young. They don't have time for education. That's why they sometimes appear stupid."

"They have to know where their team-mate is, where the opposing player is and what he did the last time they met, and they have to do all that quickly."