Surely footballers would have the a similar IQ to any other similar group of skilled labourers. Some very high IQ, some you wonder how they manage to hold it down, most average.
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Firms like Google and Microsoft often choose job candidates based on their answers to puzzles. If in my maze example you had the chance to set the other person a puzzle to test their intelligence or you could assess their intelligence by their class and type of degree which would you choose? You can bluff and cheat your way through university and get a degree. You can get a degree in most subjects by working very hard if you are not very bright. But I would guess that some puzzles if they have not been seen before can only be done if you are very intelligent. By the way, when that spiked ball is coming towards you in the maze you would not consider things like emotional intelligence as real intelligence. You just want someone with enough brain power to solve the puzzle.
Surely footballers would have the a similar IQ to any other similar group of skilled labourers. Some very high IQ, some you wonder how they manage to hold it down, most average.
Didn't Leo Fortune-West have a masters in something, or have I got him mixed up with someone else?
The IQ test is predominantly mathematical and logical in nature. intelligence comes in many forms, some of which aren't based on logic, the ability to speak multiple languages is a case in point.
puzzle solving generally relies upon learning techniques, the rubiks' cube, as has been mentioned, is a good example. It is quite easy to solve when you know the various algorithms. solving the rubik's cube doesn't make you any more intelligent than someone who cannot solve it.
I used to hear the term "footballing intelligence" and groan, but I now think I was wrong to do so. Fifteen years or so ago, Wayne Rooney burst on to the scene and it's easy now to forget just how good he was between the ages of sixteen to eighteen. A fierce drive and will to win had much to do with that and, of course, there was a level of talent that you don't usually see displayed so much in one so young, but he was also a very intelligent footballer.
He's better in front of the media now, but I'm sure an interview with the sixteen year old Rooney would have been toe curlingly embarrassing - I'm not being big headed when I say that the sixteen year old me would have eaten him alive in a general knowledge quiz, because I reckon at least three quarters of the population would have done so, yet put me, and that seventy five per cent, on a football pitch against him and he would have made the right decisions and take then right options in a purely instinctive way that would have left the rest of us flummoxed.
All of that doesn't really answer the question that was set in the thread title though. I believe intelligent people tend to think about things a lot more than less intelligent ones and, in all sorts of walks of life, that can sometimes be a disadvantage - while the more intelligent person ponders the consequences of the action they are about to take, the less intelligent one has often nipped in and taken what turns out to have been the correct decision without ever contemplating what may happen if they are wrong.
There have been enough fine players named in this thread to disprove any theory that intelligent people do not make good footballers, but, apart from Socrates and maybe Bilic, none of them could really justify the description "great" - I do think the more cerebral footballers may lack the spontaneity which the very best always have. .
Last edited by the other bob wilson; 28-03-17 at 11:07.
One other thing, what seven letter City player surname is in that list of letters Clark Carlisle is looking at in that Daily Telegraph link above?