If you’re a soccer player, chances are you watch soccer on TV, online, or at a live game. Watching soccer, especially at a high level, is a fantastic tool for learning the game. It can help to understand positioning, inspire new moves, and amp up your passion for the game. It does not build concrete skills that contribute to performance.
But what if there was a way to actually improve your soccer intelligence skills during your time off the pitch?
The Soccer IntelliGym has been shown through scientific studies to improve soccer sense. Today, we discuss an analysis of the Netherlands, a region known for its elite soccer youth development programs.
The IntelliGym uses a video-game-like interface to train the cognitive skills related to soccer players’ performance. These skills include anticipation, divided attention, working memory, peripheral awareness, and spatial perception. Other essential abilities the IntelliGym boosts our focus and concentration, team play, rapid adaptation to a dynamic environment, the ability to spot evolving opportunities, pattern recognition, execution of the game plan, and coping with time constraints. As you can see, a multitude of cognitive skills build up what is called soccer intelligence, and these skills can be strengthened through cognitive training.
Now, we know it’s tough to believe that training on a computer can improve performance in the field – so it only makes sense that this claim is verified by scientific studies. Below, we’ll discuss a study out of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, a leading research institute in the Netherlands, that measured performance improvements at two elite soccer academies, AZ Alkmaar and PSV Eindhoven, who put the Soccer IntelliGym to the test.
The Study
The study, Football IntelliGym Efficacy Analysis, looked at how cognitive training with the Soccer IntelliGym worked to develop a player’s on-field ability and compared it to watching soccer videos. This study included players from two elite soccer academies, PSV Eindhoven and AZ Alkmaar, both playing in the top league in the Netherlands and well-known for being “feeder clubs” because of their incredible youth academies.
The study included players from youth teams at each academy, each providing two groups for 52 total players between the ages of 14 and 17. Players from the teams were randomly divided into two groups. One group was assigned the Soccer IntelliGym cognitive training program, while the control group received a different computerized task: to observe video clips of real football matches and identify football-related events or actions such as passes, turnovers, headers, fouls, and shots on target by one team in that video. The duration of this task was about the same length as the IntelliGym training session.
The participants were instructed to do their IntelliGym sessions (experimental group) or the Video Challenge task (control group) two sessions a week, 30 minutes each session, for ten weeks. Both experimental and control groups’ participants were told that their respective activities were aimed at improving their football decision-making performance. The study staff closely monitored both groups’ activities to ensure they were on task.
To test the efficacy of the two training programs, the players played four 4-minute soccer mini-games in a small space, and their skills were rated both before and after the ten-week training period. The players were video-recorded from above, and the footage was later analyzed by trained university staff members. The staff evaluating did not know if the players were part of the IntelliGym group or the control group and did not know if the footage was from before or after the 10-week study. The assessment was done using a skill-assessment program called the “Notation Analysis System,” which evaluates players on essential elements: attack with and without the ball, transitions, positioning, and defense. The players’ actions are reviewed and analyzed one at a time, and when a player carries out a predefined action, the respective score (as defined in a scoring system) is awarded.
The Results
After analysis of the footage, the results were clear: the study showed that the IntelliGym-trained group showed significant performance improvement over the control group.
Individually, the IntelliGym-trained players improved their ranking significantly in all score categories compared to control group players. The attack-with-ball category was the most significant, with IntelliGym players improving by 5.9 ordinal values on average while the average control group player declined by 4.6 ranks in the same category.
It’s important to note that both groups improved. Still, the overall on-field performance of the IntelliGym group was 27 percent higher than the improvement of the group that only watched video clips.
The results from this study point to cognitive training as a powerful tool for improving on-field performance. It showed that while watching soccer games can improve soccer skills, a cognitive program like the IntelliGym is more effective. For players who want to maximize their soccer ability, putting in time with IntelliGym is the best way to improve.
