To pass or not to pass
Highly-skilled football players are better at inhibiting motion than novices, finds new study.
14 May 2024
By Emma Young
In the heat of the moment, footballers have to make split-second decisions about whether or not to pass the ball. To make that judgement, they have to rapidly locate teammates and the opposition, and triangulate how likely any given wallop of the ball is to reach the target.
The difficulty of knowing when to pass, and the frequency with which professional footballers have to correctly make that call, supports the suggestion that skilled players have some notable perceptual and cognitive abilities.
Some research has hinted that athletes are better than non-athletes at more general measures of attention and speed of cognitive processing, but a recent study from Takahiro Matsutake and colleagues takes a closer look at how they process sport-relevant decisions. Specifically, their findings, now available in Brain Sciences, reveal some novel differences between expert and inexperienced footballers on tasks designed to mimic (at least to some extent) ball-passing decisions.
The team recruited fourteen male amateur university players plus seven male football novices for their study. Of the fourteen amateur players, seven were highly skilled, and belonged to a team that had previously won a Japanese university football championship. The other seven played football regularly, but never at a regional, let alone national, level. This was the 'low-skill' group.
All of the participants wore electrodes to measure their brain activity while they completed two screen-based tasks in the lab. In the first task, they were told that when an image of a red circle popped up, that meant 'Go', while a white circle meant 'No-go'. Whenever they saw a red circle, they had to use their dominant foot to press a foot switch as quickly as possible.
The second 'pass choice' task mimicked field decisions much more closely. In this task, they were shown photos which positioned them behind the football, looking out towards three team-mates and two defenders also on the pitch. There were a total of three different player configurations. In this task, the 'Go' stimulus was a situation in which it was possible to make a downfield pass between two defenders to a teammate. In two 'No-Go' set-ups, this type of pass was not possible. As before, whenever the participant decided that the stimulus meant 'Go', they had to hit the foot switch as quickly as possible.
The researchers found a few key differences in the performance of the participant groups. Firstly, the high-skilled footballers reacted more quickly overall than the novice group. Also, the variability in reaction times was small in the high-skilled group, and bigger in the low-skilled players and the novices.
There were also some differences in the brain activity data, most notably in the more demanding 'pass choice' task. In this task, when the right decision was not to press the foot switch (ie. not to pass), the skilled players showed a stronger inhibition of movement compared with the novices. The researchers also note that there was a correlation between faster reaction times to 'Go' signals and stronger inhibition of movement, when appropriate, in the pass choice task. Compared with novices, "soccer players appear to respond faster, with neural activity of stronger inhibition," they write.
The study has a few limitations, in particular the small number of participants. But if these findings are replicated — ideally, with a group that includes professional football players, as well as amateurs and novices — they would suggest that the neural processes which suppress physical actions play an important role in a player's success at passing. Perhaps, it seems, the mark of a good player isn't just knowing when to strike, but when to hold back.
This study couldn't reveal whether these skilled players were naturally gifted with these abilities before they even started playing football, but it's possible that they were developed through extensive experience and training. The researchers therefore suggest that a training programme aimed at strengthening the neural inhibition of undesirable physical actions may perhaps help footballers to improve their passing skills, and become even better players.
