Decision making and non-verbal intelligence in football

The chapter addresses a number of issues related to decision making and non-verbal intelligence in football. Players consistently make non-verbal decisions throughout a game of football. Thus, decision making as non-verbal intelligence seems to be one of the most important skills in football that differentiates between high and low skill players, older and younger players, and successful and less successful performers. Physical challenges, techniques, tactics, and psychological skills of performance in football are mostly non-verbal in nature. In this chapter, conceptual definitions of decision making and related theories are presented from a cognitive perspective including non-verbal intelligence in football. The chapter also dwells on different measurement methods of decision making and non-verbal intelligence. In general, findings indicate that: (a) skills such as anticipation and option generation can be measured and trained; (b) despite growing interest, there are still barriers and concerns in integrating sport psychologists and methods for improving decision making and non-verbal intelligence in football teams; (c) psychological skills necessary to achieve success are still under-developed and rarely used. In addition, researchers in football using Test of Non-verbal Intelligence-2 (TONI-2) suggest that older football players, starters, professionals, footballers in central positions, and, interestingly, female football players have higher TONI-2 scores compared to their respective counterparts. Overall, results indicate the importance of decision-making processes including non-verbal intelligence in football performance.