A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a well-worn story about former Liverpool and Ireland footballer Jason McAteer when he was out one night for a meal in a pizza restaurant.

The background to this is that McAteer was famously known as Trigger after the simple character in Only Fools and Horses; in other words, by any measure he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But in fairness he also boasts the ability to laugh at himself and he tells the pizza story all the time, providing a high point at, ironically, his after-dinner shows.

So the story was that he ordered a pizza even though he wasn’t starving.

And the punchline?

“They asked if I wanted a whole pizza cut into four or eight and I said four because I’d never eat all of it.”

McAteer wouldn’t be on his own if you were excluding football stars from your table quiz team.

Of the current crop, there seems to be general agreement that, while Manchester City’s Phil Foden might light up a football pitch with his skills, he wouldn’t be first pick for a quiz team either.

His manager Pep Guardiola alluded to Phil’s lack of outside interests in a Sky Sports interview some time back when he said that the winger lived for football.

“The pressure for Phil is if he has to do a press conference about the last book that he read. But football, he loves it,” he said.

Sometimes these reputations are entirely misplaced; there used to be a suggestion that Frank Lampard wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box but anyone who has heard him interviewed will see an articulate, thoughtful man with plenty to say.

But it’s not just based on that; Lamps actually has an IQ of 150, putting him in the top 0.5 per cent in the world and just ten behind Albert Einstein.

David Beckham was famous described by the Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key as ‘thick as bats**t’ but that was only echoing what so many people had said before.

Yet the reality is that, while Becks mightn’t be the biggest customer at his local library, he had enough smarts to turn his post-football life into an ever more lucrative career than his playing life.

And he’s not alone – because a new survey has revealed that your average professional footballer is far from thick; they’re actually cleverer than the rest of us.

Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden studied 200 professional players in Brazil and Sweden, putting them through tests exploring various aspects of cognition, from working memory to executive function and problem-solving. They found that footballers consistently outperformed the average.