I’ll always remember a conversation I had with someone just after I’d interviewed the footballer Frank Lampard. ‘What was he like? I bet he was as thick as mince,’ they said. The reality was rather different: the former Chelsea captain was a thoughtful, intelligent and beautifully well-mannered man.
Footballers: ‘super clever’? This will shock some, but it doesn’t surprise me at all
Lots of people assume that footballers like Lampard lack intelligence, but a new study has found otherwise. Scientists studied 200 professional players in Brazil and Sweden, putting them through tests exploring various aspects of cognition, from working memory to executive function and problem-solving. They found that footballers consistently outperformed the average.
The players were in the 90th percentile in the tests that they were given, the equivalent of an IQ of 120 to 130. ‘These are super-clever individuals in terms of how their brain works,’ said Predrag Petrovic, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who headed the study.
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