Professional Soccer Players Smarter than Most: New Study

from menshealth.com

Frequent heading of a soccer ball isn’t good for your brain, but it’s not all bad news for participants of the world’s most popular sport: Soccer players are significantly smarter than, well, pretty much everyone, according to a new study in the venerable journal of basic science, PLoS ONE.

The power of his mind helps Messi score..

When professional soccer players were tested on “executive function”—a key aspect in memory, multitasking, and creativity—they scored significantly higher than the general population. In fact, elite players belonged to the best 2 to 5 percent of the total population, says Predrag Petrovic, Ph.D., the lead researcher and professor at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.