Does Being Good at Football Suggest Anything About Your IQ?

Discover how executive functions, rather than just general IQ, drive elite soccer performance and tactics. Click to read the science and take the RIOT IQ test!

Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist

Does Being Good at Football Suggest Anything About Your IQ?

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is in full swing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and the cognitive theater playing out on the pitch is extraordinary to observe. Lionel Messi has already scored a hat-trick against Algeria, defending Argentina's title with the same unhurried spatial intelligence that has defined his career for two decades. Kylian Mbappé is making tactical decisions at pace that no tracking system can fully explain. Cristiano Ronaldo, at 41, is still reading defensive lines with precision that younger, faster players routinely fail to match. Watching any of them for 90 minutes raises a question that the research literature has actually started to take seriously: does being good at football tell us something meaningful about how intelligent a person is? How does their skill impact the results of their IQ test?

The answer, as it usually is in psychometrics, is nuanced — and considerably more interesting than a simple yes or no.

What Football Actually Demands Cognitively

To evaluate the football-intelligence relationship properly, we need to start with an honest account of what the sport actually asks of the brain. Football is not primarily a test of raw processing power or verbal reasoning. What it demands, in real time, across 90 minutes, is something specific and measurable.

A 2025 scoping review published in Frontiers in Psychology, which systematically analyzed 15 peer-reviewed empirical studies across six major databases, found a strong association between executive functions and elite soccer players' ability to process complex game situations, anticipate opponents' actions, and make strategic decisions under pressure. Executive functions — working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and planning — are the cognitive machinery the sport taxes most directly. Many required skills in team sports can be translated into general cognitive domains, and a good team player must demonstrate excellent spatial attention, divided attention, working memory, and mentalizing capacity, quickly adapting, changing strategy, and inhibiting responses — abilities collectively referred to as "game intelligence" in sport and as executive functions in neuropsychology.

That distinction matters, and I'll return to it. Game intelligence and general IQ are not the same thing, and conflating them leads to misreadings of what football performance actually predicts.

What the Oxford-Aarhus Study Found

The most comprehensive piece of recent evidence on this question comes from a landmark 2025 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, produced by researchers at Oxford, Aarhus, Bologna, Australia, Rio de Janeiro State University, and Karolinska Institutet. Using artificial neural networks applied to a sample of 328 participants including 204 elite soccer players from top divisions in Brazil and Sweden, researchers found that elite soccer players demonstrate heightened planning and memory capacities, enhanced executive functions especially cognitive flexibility, elevated levels of conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience, coupled with reduced neuroticism. Using this cognitive and personality profile, AI was able to distinguish elite players from non-players with 97% accuracy.

That 97% classification accuracy is striking. It tells us that the cognitive profile of elite footballers is genuinely distinctive — not just slightly above average across the board, but distinctive enough that a machine learning model can reliably identify who is and isn't an elite player based on cognitive measures alone. These findings establish a strong link between cognitive skills and success at the highest levels of football, revealing that modern footballers blend sharp mental agility with physical prowess — far from the outdated stereotype of athleticism and intelligence as separate traits.

The finding also raises a question the study itself acknowledges: did football develop these cognitive capacities, or did people with higher cognitive capacities self-select into elite football? The research design can't definitively resolve that causation question, but the strength of the association is consistent regardless.

Executive Functions Predict Goals and Assists — Two Years Later

One of the most compelling individual studies in this literature is from Vestberg and colleagues, published in Scientific Reports. In a study of 51 elite soccer players, those playing at national team level significantly outperformed premier league-only players on Design Fluency, a complex visuospatial executive function test measuring creativity and cognitive flexibility. This capacity correlated with coach-rated game intelligence and — notably — correlated with number of assists made during the season but not with goals scored, linking fast multi-step planning in the test to fast multi-step planning in actual match play.

The prospective element of this research is what makes it particularly valuable. A partial correlation test showed a significant correlation between executive function test results and the number of goals and assists players scored two seasons later — strongly suggesting that cognitive function tests predict the future success of ball sport players, not merely reflect their current level. If you can measure a player's executive function profile today and reliably predict their statistical output two years from now, that's not a trivial cognitive signal. That's a meaningful predictive relationship.

A follow-up study of young elite soccer players found that the effect of executive functions on soccer success remained present even when controlling for intelligence, height, and age in partial correlation analysis — suggesting that the cognitive-performance relationship in football is not simply reducible to general IQ.

The Crucial Distinction: Executive Function vs. General IQ

Here's where I want to be precise, because this distinction is where most popular discussions of football and intelligence go wrong. The cognitive abilities that predict football success are not the same as what a Full Scale IQ score measures.

Executive functions correlate with each other but correlate less with general IQ — meaning that someone's working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control can be substantially above average even when their performance on traditional IQ subtests is not exceptional. This is a well-established psychometric finding, and it applies directly to the football context.

What football primarily tests is a specific cognitive profile: high-load, real-time executive processing of spatial and social information under time pressure, against dynamic and partially unpredictable opponents. That profile overlaps with components measured on a professional IQ battery — working memory, processing speed, and visual-spatial reasoning all show up in both contexts — but it isn't the same as measuring fluid reasoning or crystallized knowledge across a full battery of diverse subtests.

Research consistently confirms that EF test scores predict goals and assists in elite soccer even when controlling for general cognitive capacity, meaning that football skill carries cognitive information beyond what a standard IQ test captures. The implication runs in both directions: a high IQ doesn't guarantee football intelligence, and elite football performance doesn't straightforwardly imply a high general IQ score.

It Starts Earlier Than You'd Think

One of the more striking findings in this literature concerns how early the cognitive-football relationship appears. A study of young soccer players aged 8–11 applying for admission to an elite youth program found that players approved into the program scored significantly higher on general executive function tests than those who were rejected — even though admission was determined by soccer performance, not cognitive testing. The researchers proposed that measuring executive functions gives coaches an additional objective tool to assess performance potential.

This finding has real implications for talent identification. If the cognitive profile of elite players is measurably distinct even at ages 8 to 11, then clubs investing in youth academies may be inadvertently selecting for cognitive capacity alongside technical skill — whether or not they're explicitly measuring it. Players like Lamine Yamal, who at 17 is already operating as Spain's primary creative force at this World Cup, demonstrate an anticipatory and spatial awareness that far exceeds what his age would predict — and the research above suggests that cognitive profile was probably identifiable years before his professional debut.

What About Position?

The research also raises the possibility that the football-cognition relationship isn't uniform across the pitch. Evidence points to possible variations in executive function demands across playing positions, though the studies exhibit substantial methodological heterogeneity, particularly in how both executive functions and game intelligence are operationalized.

This is intuitively plausible. A central midfielder operating as a playmaker — Luka Modrić's role at Real Madrid, Xavi's role in Barcelona's tiki-taka era — demands continuous multi-directional spatial updating, opponent tracking, and split-second decision-making across every moment of possession. A central striker occupying a more constrained positional role may rely more heavily on specific anticipatory timing and finishing precision than on the broad executive load that a deep-lying playmaker carries. Whether these translate into measurable cognitive differences by position remains an active and not fully resolved area of research.

The Takeaway

Being good at football does suggest something about your cognitive profile — specifically about the executive function capacities that underpin spatial attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and multi-step planning under pressure. The evidence for this is now strong enough that a machine learning model can identify elite players from non-players with 97% accuracy using cognitive and personality measures alone, and that executive function scores predict goals and assists two years into the future.

What football performance doesn't straightforwardly index is general IQ in the traditional psychometric sense. The two constructs overlap but aren't equivalent. A player with elite football intelligence — the kind on display right now from Messi, Mbappé, Ronaldo, and Yamal at the 2026 World Cup — is demonstrating something cognitively real and measurable. But translating that into a predicted FSIQ score would require a different kind of assessment entirely.

If you want to understand where your own cognitive profile sits — across the executive and reasoning domains that overlap with what elite sport performance taxes — the RIOT gives you a systematic answer built on the same scientific framework that this body of research is grounded in.

References

PubMed Central / PNAS. (2025). Decoding the elite soccer player's psychological profile. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11760505/
University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry. (2025). Elite football players have higher levels of cognitive abilities compared to the general population. https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/elite-football-players-have-higher-levels-of-cognitive-abilities-compared-to-the-general-population-new-study
Nature / Scientific Reports. (2020). Level of play and coach-rated game intelligence are related to performance on design fluency in elite soccer players. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66180-w
PubMed Central. (2012). Executive Functions Predict the Success of Top-Soccer Players. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3319604/
PubMed Central. (2017). Core executive functions are associated with success in young elite soccer players. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5298906/
PubMed Central. (2018). Possible requirement of executive functions for high performance in soccer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6104941/
Frontiers in Psychology / PubMed Central. (2025). A scoping review of empirical research on executive functions and game intelligence in soccer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11994698/
Palatinate. (2025). The true intelligence of modern footballers. https://www.palatinate.org.uk/the-true-intelligence-of-modern-footballers/