How to Improve Your Soccer IQ

A high soccer IQ is crucial for the success of any player, regardless of position. It allows you to make better decisions more quickly and consistently help your team every second you’re on the pitch.

Unfortunately, soccer IQ doesn’t get the same attention as other aspects of the game. Youth athletes aren’t given many opportunities to improve their decision-making skills or learn how their positioning affects their team as a whole.

Soccer IQ is so important that it deserves to be separated from the rest of training. Like any vital technique, it’s up to players to improve their decision-making skills and overall mental strength on their own.

Before explaining how a young player can do this, let’s go over what soccer IQ means in the first place:

What is Soccer IQ?

A player’s soccer IQ is a reflection of their ability to make good decisions on the pitch. Soccer is unlike other sports in that every single player on the team has to make decisions and adapt to different situations.

What constitutes a good decision? A good decision is one that helps the team. A player with a high soccer IQ not only understands how their team functions, not only how each individual position supports the team’s success, but also with an eye to what is likely about to happen next in the game.  

When you know how your position fits into the larger puzzle, you can see how every decision you make affects your teammates and the flow of the game. This includes an emphasis on your behavior when you’re off the ball. After all, the average player in 11 v 11 touches the ball for just 4% of the game. A great soccer player is always putting themselves in an advantageous position that supports their teammates, even when they’re nowhere near the ball. For wingers, for example, sometimes that means dropping back to support the fullback on defense and other times it means making a run to pull the defender and create space behind them for the midfielder to operate in.

Improving Soccer IQ with Video Analysis

If you want to learn a new technique, you have to see how it’s done first, right? Watching someone playing your position making decisions gives you a model to follow.

Soccer IQ is no different. The most effective way to improve your decision-making skills is watching professional players make good (and bad) decisions in actual games. With video analysis services like BGTV, young athletes can watch curated footage of professional games that shows high-level players in their positions making crucial decisions that help their team.

This is a completely different experience than watching a match on TV. Video analysis enables players to focus their attention on an individual player, commonly in the moments before they get the ball so they can see how this person behaves in a variety of situations. What is this player doing to support their team’s momentum? Where are they positioning themselves in key moments? These aren’t the kind of things the camera focuses on when a match is shown on TV.

Further Benefits of Video Analysis

Another advantage of video analysis is hearing professionals break down these key moments and explain the logic behind a player’s decisions. Why was this a good decision? How did this decision help the team?

When you watch how players behave when they on the ball, you can see how their actions are directly influenced by their knowledge of their teammates. Great players show their soccer IQ by anticipating their teammates’ actions. They know how their teammates tend to react to certain situations, along with their strengths, weaknesses, and their favorite plays. By using your soccer IQ to anticipate what your teammates will do next, you can put yourself in a position that supports this move.  

So, improving soccer IQ is really about learning how your role on your team affects your decisions, and how your actions affect the rest of the team.

Video analysis covers these bases by providing a clear example of how someone in your position should behave throughout the entire match. Get started on boosting your soccer IQ today in just three minutes with BGTV.