Decoding the elite footballer’s psychological profile

The late Johan Cryuff famously said that football is played in the head, with decisions made in the brain determining success on the pitch. Of course, this is something of a simplification, but his observation gives rise to a fascinating question: how well can we predict which players will make it to the top of the game based purely on their psychological characteristics? As Associate Professor Bonetti explains in this Research Brief, psychological testing reveals more than we might expect.

• Elite footballers show a different combination of cognitive and psychological attributes to the general public.

• AI systems can use these differences to distinguish professional footballers from the general population based purely on psychological factors.

• Further research is needed to examine the relationship between psychological characteristics and physical attributes, to assess how far young players in academies can be psychologically trained, and whether their psychological traits alone can predict their likelihood of reaching elite levels in football.

Part 1: Background
Previous studies of the psychology of elite footballers have provided scientific evidence to back up Cruyff’s view. For example, it has been well documented that top players process information faster than others, and use that information to stay one step ahead of the action around them. Cognition, decision-making skills and certain personality traits have all been identified as possible keys to success. This latest research further tested those hypotheses using data from 204 elite players to discover what set them apart from the general public.

Part 2: Methodology
The first step was testing the elite players’ executive function, psychological makeup, planning ability and memory against the control group. Strikingly, the footballers showed above-average cognitive, planning and memory skills, and a distinct pattern of personality traits. The researchers took these results and fed them into an AI model, which was able to identify the professional players with 97% accuracy. A second AI system went on to highlight the memory test as the most important single indicator separating professional players from the control group.

Part 3: Conclusions
This would suggest that professional players display different psychological characteristics to the general population. However, this study featured a limited sample and did not compare players according to age, position or skill level. It was also focused exclusively on psychological traits. There is therefore considerable scope for future studies to build on this research, for example by measuring the potential correlation between physical and psychological characteristics in elite players, or investigating whether those traits are innate. More research in these areas could transform the role of psychological testing in talent identification.

Paper citation
Bonetti, L., Vestberg, T., Jafari, R., Seghezzi, D., Ingvar, M., Kringelbach, M. L., Filgueiras, A. & Petrovic, P. (2025). Decoding the elite soccer player’s psychological profile. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(3), e2415126122.

You can download the full paper here.

The research was conducted at the Center for Music in the Brain, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, and at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford.

Additional information and contact details are available at https://leonardobonetti.org/.