Football starts inside the mind
The training and fostering of cognitive skills were the focus of many studies and discussions during the past few years, which dealt with the development of professional football players and young talents. Most of them concluded that, especially, the speed of execution plays a vital role as a core competence of a modern football player.
The German professional coach Christoph Daum, who trained teams like Bayer Leverkusen, VfB Stuttgart, or Fenerbahce Istanbul, defined the speed of execution, as follows:
“In football, we identify the speed of execution as the ability to act very rapidly and effectively in complex situations due to visual, mental, technical, and tactical capacities.”
Measuring and training all parts of cognitive abilities, therefore, also means to know the strengths and weaknesses of a player and to be able to react to them specifically.