ArticleScientific reports2020
Level of play and coach-rated game intelligence are related to performance on design fluency in elite soccer players.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- A scoping review of empirical research on executive functions and game intelligence in soccer.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Executive Function Strengths in Athletes: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Brain and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- Students' Inhibition, Cognitive Flexibility, and Performance Calibration Across Command, Practice, and Self-Check Teaching Styles in Physical Education: An Exploratory Field Study.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Revisiting the cognitive advantages of professional soccer players.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Multidimensional performance characteristics of youth academy and club soccer players.PloS one · 2026Article
- Associations between executive functions, coaches' evaluation, and performance development in youth soccer.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Associations Between Neurofeedback, Anthropometrics, Technical, Physical, and Tactical Performance in Young Women's Football Players.Journal of functional morphology and kinesiology · 2025Article
- Reply to Musculus et al.: A case of offside in scientific discourse?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Decoding the elite soccer player's psychological profile.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Differences in judgments on the importance of performance psychological factors among Korean and Chinese football experts.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Neurological mechanisms of mental fatigue in cognitive flexibility in soccer players: an event-related potential study based on N2 components.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Persistent cognitive deficits in ACL-injured athletes despite of rehabilitation: an observational longitudinal study.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2025Article
- Improvements in executive functions by domain-specific cognitive training in youth elite soccer players.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Relation of general-perceptual cognitive abilities and sport-specific performance of young competitive soccer players.European journal of sport science · 2024Article
- Cognition in elite soccer players: a general model.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Cognitive flexibility is associated with sickness resilience.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The interaction between acute emotional states and executive functions in youth elite soccer players.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Cognition in soccer and futsal: evidence of validity of a 4-instrument protocol to assess executive functioning among women athletes.BMC psychology · 2023Article
- Determining the effect of one decade on fitness of elite Austrian youth soccer players using propensity score matching.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2023Article
- Deficits in specific executive functions manifest by severity in major depressive disorder: a comparison of antidepressant naïve inpatient, outpatient, subclinical, and healthy control groups.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Executive brain functions are innate mechanisms for regulating behavior. While the impact of suboptimal executive functions has been characterized in patients, their contribution to individual success has not been elucidated. We set out to understand how executive functions relate to successful human behavior by examining their relation to game intelligence in sport - the ability to read a game and quickly adapt the behavior. In elite soccer players (n = 51), those playing in national teams (national team players) significantly outperformed those only playing at premier league level (premier league players) in Design Fluency (DF), a complex visuo-spatial executive function test that includes measures of creativity and cognitive flexibility. Their result showed a moderate correlation with coach rated game intelligence, remained also when correcting for low level cognitive capacity and was most evident when considering cognitive flexibility. DF capacity also correlated with number of assists made during the season but not with number of made goals during the same period, linking the fast planning of several steps in DF to fast planning of several steps in the soccer game. Altogether, our data suggests that DF capacity relates to success in soccer both on a subjective and on an objective level.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.