biology<\/a>, we often separate the effects of genes and environment to understand why organisms differ,\u201d Salinas said. \u201cWe realized we could apply the same idea to soccer. Players are like genotypes, teammates are the environment, and performance is the resulting phenotype.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nWhat they found surprised even the researchers. Individual player effects accounted for only about 11% to 12% of the variation in performance, while teammate combinations explained 20% to 23%. The rest,\u00a0nearly two-thirds,\u00a0remained unpredictable,\u00a0likely influenced\u00a0by opponent dynamics, moment-to-moment decisions, and the inherent randomness of low-scoring games.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you actually see the numbers, it\u2019s eye-opening,\u201d\u00a0Yonehara\u00a0said. \u201cI expected teamwork to matter, but I didn\u2019t expect individual impact to be that small.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Yonehara, the research question was personal. A biology major who played soccer throughout his life, he had long felt that games are won in moments that often miss the highlight reels.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople talk about great teams like they\u2019re just a collection of great individuals,\u201d he said. \u201cBut from playing, you know that without cohesion, without players doing the unseen work, the whole thing falls apart.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study also compared match performance with traditional skill assessments including passing accuracy, dribbling speed, shooting precision and ball control. Those measures, commonly used in evaluations and tryouts, did not strongly predict how much a player helped their team in games.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a big takeaway for me,\u201d Sonera said. \u201cBeing great in isolated drills doesn\u2019t necessarily translate to being effective in real gameplay.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sonera, who has loved soccer since childhood, was drawn to the project because it merged science with a sport built on collaboration.<\/p>\n
\u201cSoccer demands understanding your teammates,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s part of what makes it beautiful. This research puts numbers behind that idea.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In soccer, chemistry might outweigh star power. A new study from Kalamazoo College, published in Football Studies, found…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-621434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}