Executive functions: what a knowledge test does not measure

Insporta measures sport-specific knowledge and says so. It does not measure executive functions, reaction speed, general intelligence or any physical trait, and it does not use those words to describe its scores. The reason is the state of the evidence: the early studies linking executive functions to football success were cross-sectional, the strongest longitudinal study found no such link, and the most thorough critical review argues the field has been measuring impure constructs under misleading names.

The case for executive functions

Executive functions are the higher-level cognitive processes that regulate behaviour: working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility. A part of the literature treats them as the mental foundation of sporting success, and two studies are cited more than any others in support.

Verburgh et al. 2014. 126 boys aged 8 to 16, of whom 84 were talented academy players and 42 amateurs. Inhibition, measured with a Stop Signal task, and alerting, measured with the Attention Network Test, classified players into the two groups with 89% accuracy. Working memory and executive attention did not distinguish them.

Vestberg et al. 2017. Two small samples, 21 and 24 players. Core executive functions, working memory in particular, were associated with success in young elite players. The authors themselves note that higher-level executive functions keep developing through adolescence, which makes the interpretation ambiguous: a difference between two age groups may be development rather than talent.

These two papers underpin much of the commercial growth of brain-training products in sport. They are real findings. They are also both cross-sectional, and Vestberg’s own caveat about age applies to both: any comparison between players on a generic function has to control for age.

The case against: Beavan et al. 2020

The largest and most convincing challenge is longitudinal. Beavan and colleagues followed players of a professional German club across three seasons: 343 players aged 10 to 34, with 1,018 observations, one to five per player. They tracked how executive functions changed over time.

Their conclusion, in their own words, is that the developmental trajectories of executive functions in these footballers follow those of the general population, despite years of sport-specific training and competition. This, they write, calls into question the link between high-level experience and executive functions, and makes the inclusion of executive functions in talent identification processes contentious.

The implication for the cross-sectional findings is direct. If children who enter an elite academy and children who stay in amateur football develop executive functions along the same curve, the differences Verburgh and Vestberg observed at a single moment are more plausibly a product of who was selected than of what training did. On this evidence executive function is not something sport visibly changes, and not a promising basis for identifying who will succeed at it.

Beavan’s study is one club and one country. It is the best longitudinal evidence available, not the last word, and the disagreement with the earlier studies is a live one in the literature.

The critical review: Furley, Schütz and Wood 2023

Published in the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, this review goes beyond the individual studies to the methods of the whole field. Three warnings apply to every cognitive assessment in sport, Insporta included.

Task impurity. Any cognitive test measures several constructs at once. A test labelled “working memory” also draws on attention, motivation, motor speed and understanding of instructions. There is no pure measurement, and a test that claims one is overclaiming.

The jingle-jangle fallacy. Tests with the same name do not necessarily measure the same thing (jingle), and tests with different names may measure the same thing (jangle). The “Football Intelligence” score examined by Reinhard, Mann and Höner (2025) is a composite of four generic tasks with no football stimulus in it. The name promises something the content does not deliver. See sport-specific knowledge, not generic brain training.

Transparency of operationalisation. The authors ask that every test describe honestly what it measures and not claim what has not been shown empirically.

Why Insporta names its construct

Following Furley and colleagues, Insporta states its construct in plain terms: sport-specific declarative and procedural knowledge, meaning rules, tactics, opponent patterns, and historical and contextual facts about the sport. It does not describe its results as intelligence, football IQ, cognitive ability or decision-making skill.

The methodology turns that statement into rules for every question. A question is out of scope, however well written, if it tests:

• general cognitive ability, executive functions or reaction speed;
• physical or biomechanical characteristics of the athlete, such as training loads, strength protocols or recommended weights;
• reading rather than knowledge, for instance by referring to a passage the player has not seen.

Borderline material from sports science, psychology or economics is admissible only where the answer is a fact about the sport rather than about the person.

Task impurity still applies. A ten-question test with four options and one key draws on reading, attention and test-taking habit as well as knowledge. Insporta reduces the contamination it can control, by holding stems and options within length corridors so that response time reflects thinking rather than reading, and by treating time as one dimension among several rather than as the score. What remains is acknowledged, not hidden.

A different kind of construct

There is a further reason to prefer knowledge over executive function as the thing to measure, and it is practical. Beavan’s players developed executive functions on the same curve as everyone else, whatever they did on the pitch. Knowledge of a sport is different: it is acquired, it can be taught, and a coach or a player can act on a gap in it. A test that finds a player does not know the offside law or the pressing triggers of a 4-3-3 points to something a training session can fix. A test that finds a player’s inhibition score is average points to nothing anyone can do.

Where executive functions sit in the wider hierarchy of sport cognition is covered in three levels of cognition.