Skill not athleticism predicts individual variation in match performance of soccer players

Abstract

Just as evolutionary biologists endeavour to link phenotypes to fitness, sport scientists try to identify traits that determine athlete success. Both disciplines would benefit from collaboration, and to illustrate this, we used an analytical approach common to evolutionary biology to isolate the phenotypes that promote success in soccer, a complex activity of humans played in nearly every modern society. Using path analysis, we quantified the relationships among morphology, balance, skill, athleticism and performance of soccer players. We focused on performance in two complex motor activities: a simple game of soccer tennis (1 on 1), and a standard soccer match (11 on 11). In both contests, players with greater skill and balance were more likely to perform better. However, maximal athletic ability was not associated with success in a game. A social network analysis revealed that skill also predicted movement. The relationships between phenotypes and success during individual and team sports have potential implications for how selection acts on these phenotypes, in humans and other species, and thus should ultimately interest evolutionary biologists. Hence, we propose a field of evolutionary sports science that lies at the nexus of evolutionary biology and sports science. This would allow biologists to take advantage of the staggering quantity of data on performance in sporting events to answer evolutionary questions that are more difficult to answer for other species. In return, sports scientists could benefit from the theoretical framework developed to study natural selection in non-human species.

Attractiveness is positively related to World Cup performance in male, but not female, biathletes

“…Our study complements related findings in Tour de France cyclists (Postma 2014) and mixed martial artists (Little et al 2015) and adds to the nascent field of evolutionary sports science (Wilson et al 2017), highlighting the value of sports data as a rich resource for investigating how selection acts on psychological and physiological aspects of athletic performance. Using annual performance measures from the biathlon World Cup, we found that male, but not female, biathletes who had achieved a higher career peak were rated as more physically attractive by the opposite sex.…”

The Relationship Between Age and Divisional Rank in Professional Mixed Martial Arts

“…What has been observed, however, is that a combined RG1 across the whole cohort was statistically older than all the other ranking groups, by ~2 years. This demonstrates that the physiological effects of age are not necessarily the key variables to consider when assessing a competitor's potential performance, a finding which has recently been reflected in both team and combat sports (Wilson et al, 2017). As RG2 -RG5 across the whole cohort had very similar age profiles, this suggests that the increased skill mastery and experience that comes with age can outweigh the physiological decrements, at least in the short term, so older competitors are able to maintain a relatively high ranking once this level has been reached.…”

Elite swimmers do not exhibit a body mass index trade-off across a wide range of event distances

“…Our results have broader implications for the debate over trade-offs between speed and endurance in animal locomotion. As such, our work demonstrates the potential for insights that can be drawn from exploring the connections between human performance, sports science and evolutionary biology, a point recently made by Wilson et al [17]. Trade-offs are a common and appealing idea in biology and beyond (e.g.…”