The one aspect you don’t mention, and I am wondering if it is relevant, is the inherent cognitive capacity a player has. I have to imagine the ceiling is different for each player. Can it be raised? How do you think about this?
Valid question, and you're right, I did leave it out, but there's a reason.
Inherent capacity is real. Working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility do vary between players, and Vestberg's research shows those measures predict output at the top of the game. A natural ceiling exists, and it varies from player to player, but it's almost never the ceiling that actually limits progress.
What caps football intelligence in the moment isn't the innate limit, it's technical cognitive cost. The player's technique is consuming the very resource he'd use to read the game, and that will deplete well before any biological ceiling limits him. The player who looks limited under pressure usually isn't hitting a cognitive ceiling. What has happened is that his technique fell back into conscious control and took the capacity he needed to think.
So can it be raised? It can, and on two levels. The functional ceiling, the capacity actually available to solve the game, rises every time you take a technique to real automaticity, because execution moves off the system that thinking depends on. That's most of the gain, and it's a massive one. The raw capacity is also more trainable than people assume, especially young, which is the whole Polgár lesson.
The honest caveat is that true outliers exist, and at the extreme tail, some of that is biological. But for almost every player we'll coach, the innate ceiling is nowhere near the constraint, but the cost is. And lowering it doesn't add anything to the player. It returns the resource his technique was consuming, so the capacity he always had becomes available to solve the game.
The one aspect you don’t mention, and I am wondering if it is relevant, is the inherent cognitive capacity a player has. I have to imagine the ceiling is different for each player. Can it be raised? How do you think about this?
Valid question, and you're right, I did leave it out, but there's a reason.
Inherent capacity is real. Working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility do vary between players, and Vestberg's research shows those measures predict output at the top of the game. A natural ceiling exists, and it varies from player to player, but it's almost never the ceiling that actually limits progress.
What caps football intelligence in the moment isn't the innate limit, it's technical cognitive cost. The player's technique is consuming the very resource he'd use to read the game, and that will deplete well before any biological ceiling limits him. The player who looks limited under pressure usually isn't hitting a cognitive ceiling. What has happened is that his technique fell back into conscious control and took the capacity he needed to think.
So can it be raised? It can, and on two levels. The functional ceiling, the capacity actually available to solve the game, rises every time you take a technique to real automaticity, because execution moves off the system that thinking depends on. That's most of the gain, and it's a massive one. The raw capacity is also more trainable than people assume, especially young, which is the whole Polgár lesson.
The honest caveat is that true outliers exist, and at the extreme tail, some of that is biological. But for almost every player we'll coach, the innate ceiling is nowhere near the constraint, but the cost is. And lowering it doesn't add anything to the player. It returns the resource his technique was consuming, so the capacity he always had becomes available to solve the game.