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It can be for your business too

Six years ago Arsène Wenger was asked to name football’s next game-changer.

He said neuroscience.

Not pressing systems. Not data analytics. Not another generation of GPS vests. The lump of grey matter sitting behind every player’s eyes.

His logic was brutally simple. The body has been maxed out. The Premier League is now wall-to-wall sprinters. The next yard, Wenger argued, has to come from somewhere else entirely…from how fast a player can think.

In 2026, that argument is no longer fringe. It’s a research field. And it’s quietly rewriting how clubs identify, develop and look after the players we’ll be watching in five years’ time.

Ask any business leader today where the next game changer will come from? I’d wager most would predictably reference our current obsession with artificial intelligence.

Neuroscience sadly wouldn’t get a look in.

But with all the technological aids and advancements in the world, perhaps because of them, the very human capabilities for processing information, delivering critical thinking, under pressure and at pace, I’d argue will be even more important.

Business could learn a lot from football.

What an MRI machine saw inside Neymar

Back in 2014, a group of Japanese researchers slid Neymar into an MRI scanner and asked him to perform a controlled exercise. Then they ran the same exercise past a group of Spanish second division pros.

The headline number is the kind that stops a coffee mid-sip.

Neymar’s brain fired roughly 90% fewer neurons than the lower-league players to do the same job.

Sit with that for a second.

The early attempts at “training the brain” were predictably gimmicky.

In 2017 Wenger had the Arsenal first team strap on virtual reality headsets. The experiment was short-lived. Players reported motion sickness. The headsets went back in the box.

Something they called “magic”

Eric Castien is a former journalist who spent time inside Barcelona’s famed academy and came away with a question he couldn’t shake.

He’d asked the coaches what separated the elite from the rest. They gave him the standard trinity — technical, physical, mental — and Castien pushed back. Which one is decisive?

The answer was the unsettling bit.

The decisive ingredient, the coaches told him, was something they couldn’t coach. Something they cheerfully called magic.

Castien teamed up with two Dutch neuroscientists and built a battery of games designed to interrogate that “magic” — short-term memory, anticipation, reaction speed. They put it in front of more than a thousand professional players across Europe, including Champions League regulars. They wanted to know what the elite shared at the brain level that everyone else lacked.

One trait kept separating them.

Speed of information processing.

Castien’s company, BrainsFirst, now licenses the test to major football clubs; PSV Eindhoven, Real Sociedad, Southampton to name a few, as part of how they identify and develop talent. His pitch to scouts is uncomfortable: that the reason so many gifted sixteen-year-olds never make it isn’t poor coaching or bad luck. It’s that nobody bothered to look inside their heads.

“Soccer is primarily a brain game or brain activity. Without the brain the muscles, bones, lungs or anything else is of no use. The so-called ‘cockpit between the ears’ determines whether one can play at a high level. Therefore insights from neuroscience are extremely helpful for club management.” – Eric Castien

Beckham wasn’t a freak. He was a feedback loop.

This is where the science doubles back on the oldest cliché in the dressing room.

Holly Bridge is a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford whose team works on a project called Football on the Brain. She will tell you flatly that the unfashionable instinct to drill, repeat, drill, repeat is dead right.

Muscle memory, it turns out, isn’t in the muscles.

It lives in the cerebellum — a pattern of neurons firing in such well-worn grooves that the action becomes automatic. Each rep tightens the connection. Each mistake retunes it. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice rewires the brain until perfect becomes the path of least resistance.

Which means the worn old line about David Beckham being the last man off the training pitch isn’t sentimental nostalgia.

It’s neurology.

Talent loaded the gun. Repetition pulled the trigger ten thousand times until eventually the trigger pulled itself.

The arm round the shoulder, now with a brain scan

The other front in football’s neuroscience push is happening somewhere a lot less glamorous than an MRI suite.

Sally Needham works in cognitive neuroscience — the study of how the nervous system and the body talk to each other. Her summary of the field is the kind of line you wish more leaders understood: whatever we think, we feel; whatever we feel, we think.

She’s worked inside the academy at Sheffield United, watching for the moments where young players slide into what she calls the red zone — limited thinking, limited scanning, limited decisions. Then she works with coaches and players to spot it earlier and recover from it faster.

The repetition principle from the cerebellum applies here too. Build emotional resilience off the pitch. Build it again. Build it again. By the time the kid is on the pitch, the new pattern is the default.

The striking part is how willingly the current generation has taken to it. The boys, Needham says, love the yoga. Love the mindfulness. Love the colouring in. They’ve grown up understanding emotions as a continuum rather than a weakness. The dressing-room sneer of twenty years ago has been replaced by something closer to curiosity.

Could we discover this curiosity inside our boardrooms and workplaces?

At least one New Zealand executive leader believes the answer is unequivocally yes. Dom Petrus is the CEO & cofounder of teambleu.com, a start up applying established neuroscience with AI.

Our technology harnesses both neuroscience and AI to “put an arm around the shoulder” while also developing the key mental skills of meta cognition and emotional self regulation. We’re really pushing for people to embrace science for success at work. It’s so important that individuals are supported and enabled with neuroscience to both be well and to perform well. For leaders it offers a new paradigm for how they can support their people and manage their team for success. It is 100% a game changer.

Is it realistic for workplace professionals to apply scientific principles for performance optimization in a similar manner to football and other athletes? Adoption may be slow but Petrus clearly believes the answer is affirmative and has been a passionate advocate over many years. Professional sports have always been more willing to explore every angle to find those critical gains in performance. But even for football and the wider athletic realm, fully embracing the potential of neuroscience has a long way to go. So perhaps we can show some grace for workplaces being a little slow on the uptake. As Petrus explains…

At work we tend to equate performance with results or the much dreaded “performance review.” There simply isn’t the understanding within leadership or HR for the true scientific concept of performance. Realistically why would there be? This simply isn’t in the exisiting skillset or knowledge base of your typical executive or HR Leader. The consequence is that it gets pushed to the fringes. Left to the occasional interaction with a consultant or perhaps the topic of a team workshop. Progress will only be made when the science of performance is understood and fully embedded within organizations and workplaces. This is precisely what we have to offer with teambleu. We’re making the scientific drivers of performance visible and measurable at work. What’s measured can be managed, this becomes the driver for genuinely transformative leadership.

The science isn’t new. It’s the application that is vital.

Read all of this and a quiet conclusion lands.

Neuroscience isn’t replacing football’s traditional wisdom. It’s vindicating it.

Repetition matters. Smart players genuinely think faster, not just better. The arm round the shoulder is real medicine. Practice makes the unconscious mind do the heavy lifting. The best coaches have always known who needs the kick and who needs the hug.

What’s new is that we can now measure it. Train it. Identify it in a fourteen-year-old before he’s kicked a competitive ball.

Wenger’s prediction is quietly coming true. Not because the clubs are turning into laboratories, but because the laboratory is finally explaining what the best coaches have always done on instinct.

The next frontier for neuroscience is the boardroom.

The next game changer in business isn’t artificial intelligence, it could well be neuroscience combined with artificial intelligence.

And that’s when the real magic might just happen.

Source: Using your head: neuroscience is fast becoming football’s gamechanger. Written by Paul MacInnes for The Guardian. 1/6/24