Elias Ramos

I don’t actually like this study at all. It compares elite U18 players from Brazil and Spain and finds this interesting tendency: the Brazilian players were generally more accurate in their decisions, while the Spanish players generally made them faster. But the test is players watching football situations on a laptop and clicking an answer. There’s no ball arriving, no opponent closing you down, no execution, no changing information while you’re acting. So for me, that’s not really football performance. BUT… I really like the distinction it gives us as coaches. Making the correct decision and making a quicker decision are not necessarily the same ability. You can have a player who understands the situation, eventually sees the best solution, but sees it too late. Equally you can have the kid who plays at 100mph, makes decisions immediately, but half of them are no good. Those players don’t necessarily need the same coaching from you. If the problem is speed, I probably need to think about how quickly information is changing around the player. Can I manipulate space, time, numbers, pressure etc so that they have to recognize things earlier? Not just shout “PLAY QUICKER,” but actually create situations where waiting means the opportunity disappears. If the problem is quality, simply making everything faster might make things worse. That player might need richer experiences of the problem, more variation, better references for where to direct their attention and more opportunities to recognize what an effective solution actually looks like. The paper itself treats decision speed and quality as partly distinct qualities rather than one single thing called “decision-making.” Personally, that's what I do like about this research. We talk about “improving decision-making” as though that tells us anything. What actually needs improving? Are they not seeing the right solution or are they seeing it too late? The player we ultimately want is both. They recognize the relevant information early enough AND arrive at an effective solution quickly enough that it almost looks instinctive. That, to me, is what we mean when we watch a player and say they have a really high football IQ. It's playing intuitively. But underneath that intuition is a player who has learned what to notice, what it means and how quickly they need to act on it. researchgate.net/publication…