Barcelona striker Lionel Messi must be reaping huge benefits on field with his unmatchable playing techniques that is confined to him alone. The entire football fraternity went gaga over the player as he went on a scoring spree. During the process, he surpassed records that have been created decades earlier such as the one by Gerd Muller.
The Argentine soccer legend too received the prestigious FIFA Ballon d’Or Award by beating the likes of Portuguese skipper Cristiano Ronaldo and Radamel Falcao. In fact, his match winning abilities has found a new fan in Andres Iniesta as well, who claims that Barca is not just Messi alone.
Ardent football fans who have been trying to crack the code behind Messi’s success with the ball have been able to get answers to all their questions. Researchers at Britain's Brunel University noticed that exceptionally talented football players are able to charge additional areas of their brain than others when an opposing player nears, ensuring them to swiftly react to their moves more successfully.
This is the same secret attributed to other celebrated players like Ronaldo, Iniesta, Rooney and Falcao among several other players. The results offer a huge reprieve for all those who were trying to match their skills with them all this while.
Barcelona superstar Lionel Messi may be attributing his trademark feints and body swerves to the fact his brain is alert than that of a less gifted player, which has been found according to a study into a footballers' minds.
The research results have been published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology as well. It has been found that experienced players are able to restrict the urge to react instinctively, ensuring making them less likely to fall for opponents' attempts to trick them.
With this official publication, a major breakthrough has now been obtained regarding the playing tactics of several players in a single shot. It now needs to be seen that how each players and critics will respond to this new found theory.
As part of this latest study, 39 players ranging right from the beginners to semi-professionals lay in an MRI brain scanner and viewed numerous clips of a junior international-level player running towards them with the ball.
Very rarely, the oncoming player would result in a deceptive manoeuvre and the corresponding participants had to decide in which way they need to move in order to counter.
They were then grouped according to how well they performed in the task, revealing that strong performers were more attuned to the actions and movements of opponents than their less-skilled counterparts.
"Our neuroimaging data clearly shows greater activation of motor and related structures in the brains of expert footballers, compared to novices, when taking part in a football-related anticipation task," said Daniel Bishop from Brunel University.
"We believe that this greater level of neural activity is something that can be developed through high quality training, so the next step will be to look at how the brain can be trained over time to anticipate the moves of opponents."
