FOOTBALL players can get better if they practice CHESS! It is no longer just a theory, it is now a certainty. Teodora Velea, chess trainer, chess teacher at the National Sport University, and last but not least, the first person in Romania who gave her doctorate in chess, tells us how the whole story began.

Many people asked me where the idea for my doctoral thesis, entitled "The impact on sports by practicing chess", started. I can say that the starting point of this topic was the quote of the well-known football manager Sir Alex Ferguson:

🏆 “UEFA gave us a Champions League final chess set.”

✅ “He referenced it in his team talk for the game...”

👊 “He spoke about the players that weren’t in the team...”

Darren Fletcher reveals what Sir Alex Ferguson said before the 2008 final. pic.twitter.com/gx6NUVS7LZ

— talkSPORT (@talkSPORT) May 25, 2020

“What makes the difference in the last third? It's your decision-making. We were on to players about it all the time. If I were starting again, I would force every player to learn chess to give them the ability to concentrate. When you first learn chess you can be three or four hours finishing a game. But when you've mastered it and start playing 30-second chess, that's the ultimate. Quick decisions, under pressure. What football is all about.”

Around the same period, I read the book "The art of learning" written by Josh Waitzkin, national chess champion, in which he told how chess helped him become a martial arts champion. So, I started asking myself the question:

Does practicing chess help athletes increase their performance?

After the hypothesis emerged that chess would help improve athletes' performance, I had to make a plan to make it happen. Thus, we started collaborating with the FC Player Junior football team, a relatively new team, but with dedicated coaches and very talented children. The team members were divided into two groups: experimental and control. They gave initial assessments to see the level of indicators to be analyzed, indicators related to their cognitive abilities, but also a technical assessment.

During the 9 months, the experimental group followed a chess training program, every week, for one hour. After everyone learned to move the pieces and became familiar with some important principles of chess, we moved on to tactical and strategy exercises. There were also the evaluation tests that covered several aspects studied, as well as the flash contests from each month.

After 9 months, following the final evaluations supported by the experimental group, it was found that, indeed, chess helps the development of athletes mentally, but also technically, they develop skills such as attention, ability to take of decisions, visualization, etc.

I hope that this research will be the first of many that will follow, leading to the introduction of chess in the world of other sports, as a tool to improve the attention of athletes, a defining aspect in achieving performance. I also believe that in order to have visible results, children need to become familiar with chess from an early age and practice it for a long time.

My study does not end here, I will also check if chess helps to improve the technique and tactics in the game of football and I hope the results will be as promising as those obtained in the case of the first research. Until then, I also hope more and more football clubs will introduce chess in the children's program, as an entertainment activity or as a specialized course, of course held by professional chess trainers.

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