win? Or the one that wins the most duels?  Or the team that covers the most distance?

According to Jogiy Löw running data  and ball possession statistics are not  

decisive when it comes to football.

Instead it's often game deciding  moments that determine football matches.  

Moments of genius born out of instinct and  intuition. The brain is a footballer's best asset.  

Commitment is essential in football, no doubt, as  is a strong physique and of course sometimes you  

need a bit of luck. It can make all the difference  between victory and defeat in tight contests.

But physical and technical differences between  the top players are decreasing, so what really  

makes the difference between winning and  losing? One human organ stands above the rest.

Take it from Andrea Pierlo: Football is played  with the head, your feet are just the tools.

So football is often decided in the  mind, but how does it work exactly?  

Let's ask an expert in the field,  Professor Dr. Daniel Memmert.

Football players are all able to find  extraordinary technical and tactical optimal  

solutions in extremely complex situations. Kane  has a very special moment, he has a visual scan  

of the environment. He turns his head to the right  and sees there's a player from the opening team  

and he had scanned the other side down the  line as well. And so when he got the ball,  

he turned the right way to the left,  and knows what to do to: pass the ball  

in the gap, and at the end it was  the second last pass before the goal.

Harry Kane processed everything around him and  perfectly executed his next move in almost no  

time at all. Players who are quickest of thoughts  can execute such a pass and are the most valuable.

Lionel Messi is probably the best example.

And he knows exactly what's going to happen, but  his head is always like this, he's always moving.

He's not running but he's  always watching what happened.

Exceptional players know  what is going on around them,  

they know where the free space is and where the  ball will be next. This knowledge enables them  

to be one step ahead. However, this speed  is not a physical quality but a mental one.  

Often players can't even explain why they  drifted into a certain space at a certain moment,  

they just did it. Another footballer who possesses  this exceptional talent is Andres Iniesta.

Iniesta has a very special ability.  Neuroscientists at the Karolinska  

Institute in Sweden conducted tests in  Barcelona. They found that Iniesta was  

among the top 0.1 percent in the so-called design  fluency and inhibition tests. It means Iniesta is  

able to visually grasp game situations very  quickly, much faster than his opponents,  

and he can instinctively react to situations much  faster, too. Psychologist Gary Klein highlights  

this skill in sport as tacit knowledge and ability  to do things without being able to explain how.

Do the very best players have  this skill coded into their DNA  

or do they have to learn and practice it?

The best players in the world like Messi have to  train all day long. Football players could train  

their mind, that means they can train  it on the pitch but they can train it  

in the lab. We have developed different  kind of training scenarios in the lab  

where you can online train the attention  window for example or other cognitive skills.

To foster tactical creativity  it is important to search  

for new solutions on the pitch all  the time. That improves your fluency.

Footballers have to train so that their brains and  bodies harmonize. This is the only way to create  

a process called long-term potentiation "LTP"  for short. If you train something repeatedly the  

frequency inside the brain is increased. After a  while LTP sets in. Now more stimuli are passed on  

to the cell. In exceptional players these impulses  are transmitted better, just like there are  

people who learn to play the piano quicker than  others. Practice makes perfect, but not everyone  

processes material equally. In football there are  exercises which help train cognitive abilities.

For example you can foster attention, which  is a very important skill in football and in  

other team sports. Then you can have like a  rondo, that means you have different kind of  

players and you have two balls, and you have  to pass the ball to each other, so you have  

to keep in your visual field in your  attention window you have to see the two  

balls and you have to perceive the opponent  players and your own players. And so you  

train the attention window, you train  attention, which is very important in motion.

Because modern football keeps getting faster,  attributes such as attention, perception,  

anticipation, creativity and game intelligence  are becoming more central to training.  

Players with these special  skill sets have always existed,  

and it has often been in their minds  where games have been won or lost.

Players who can think faster and react quicker  than others, but only when they build on their  

natural ability and hone their craft. For example  through exercises which improve awareness,  

decision making, and overall mental capacity.  In order to gain a better picture of what  

is happening in a game there are exercises  which train the peripheral field of vision.  

This helps players process movements at the edge  of their normal field of vision. In the infinite  

walk exercise for example players build the  connection between their eyes and head movements  

with their body movement. The goal of the exercise  is to use one's body and mind intelligently.

Ultimately scanning and  processing should look like this.

You have the map - in his eyes and his brain to  know exactly what is the space and what is the  

panorama. Looks like being in the  jungle where he has to survive.

Let's call on the experts again. Cruyff  said you play football with your head  

and your legs are there to help you.

As for Iniesta...

The head seems to play a fundamental  role during game and this is particular  

evident in soccer. In general cognition is simply  defined as those higher mental functions and  

processes necessary to generate apparent solutions  in certain situations in given environments.

The solutions are based on  experience, from training and playing  

as well as intuition. Intuition however is a  difficult concept to grasp. As Klein explains,  

intuition includes tacit  knowledge that we can't describe  

it includes the ability to recognize  patterns stored in our memory.

Players who can think and act quickly have  these patterns stored in their memory,  

which they can retrieve intuitively.

According to a study by researchers  Joseph Johnson and Marcus Raab  

players should rely on their first impulse.  Their first spontaneous idea is usually the best.  

The more options that come to mind, the worse  their decision making becomes. This applies  

even more so to the best footballers whose  minds can react quicker than others. Jogi Löw  

probably sums it up best: speed of thought is more  important than physical speed when a player has  

good technique and decent speed but it's slow in  his head, that can reduce his worth to the team.

Mario Götze's career may have  stuttered in recent years,  

but his winning goal in the 2014 World  Cup showed quick thinking and execution  

which decided the game in a flash. Brain over  brawn, that's what wins you football matches.

Football is played in the mind.

So it treats my brain like a muscle, I train it.