It is not just the distinctive jersey that sets the keeper apart in a football team. According to a recent study from Ireland, players in this position process the sensory stimuli they are confronted with on the pitch very differently to how their team members see and hear the game. Assessing the study’s findings, German goalkeeping coach Florian Beck told our channels that the difference makes sense.

As a former goalkeeper in the Irish NIFL Premiership, Michael Quinn had a suspicion that he wanted to explore scientifically as a student of biopsychology. In his own experience, goalkeepers were clearly “weird guys” and undoubtedly different from everyone else on the pitch. The observation was once made intuitively, though not very scientifically by the legendary Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon.

“Unlike other football players, goalkeepers are required to make thousands of very fast decisions based on limited or incomplete sensory information,” Quinn writes in a Dublin City University website story about his study. Published in the international journal Current Biology, the lead author hypothesised that keepers would possess “an enhanced capacity to combine information from the different senses”.

 

Sound and vision…and fast! Keepers have better perceptual-cognitive abilities

 

For his study, he gathered 60 participants, all men, who were divided into three different groups. One consisted of professional goalkeepers, another of professional footballers in other positions, and the third was a group of men of about the same age who did not play soccer at all. All subjects then took part in the same experiment, which looked like this: separately, the men were each exposed to a visual stimulus consisting of one or two flashes. This was accompanied by either one signal tone, two signal tones, or none at all. The scientists varied the intervals at which the visual and acoustic stimuli were triggered. The test participants were then asked how many flashes and tones they had registered.

The result: the less time there was between the different stimuli, the more likely the test subjects were to misreport the number and nature of the stimuli. The most common error was to remember a single flash, quickly followed by two tones, as two flashes and two tones. But one group differed significantly from the other two: the professional goalkeepers were able to name the correct number of flashes and tones. Their so-called temporal binding window, which is defined as the time window in which the participants can perceive and subsequently process acoustic and visual stimuli separately from each other, was significantly smaller than that of the other groups. The hypothesis was thus confirmed in this admittedly small test group: goalkeepers are better at distinguishing between different sensory stimuli and are therefore better equipped to react adequately to spontaneous situations.

 

Ball trajectory is derived from various factors, and when sight is obscured, sound matters

 

Goalkeepers are forced to make quick decisions based on various sensory stimuli, which are often asynchronous. In order to assess the direction and flight of a potentially dangerous ball, goalkeepers pay attention to the exact position of the shooting player in relation to the ball. But if a clear view of the shooting player is blocked, they could also take the sound of the ball being hit into account for their assessment and therefore concentrate on the acoustic information. This skill is regarded by the authors as particularly keen in athletes…but not just athletes.

“Our finding that professional goalkeepers exhibit a narrower temporal binding window relative to the other two groups is consistent with prior research indicating that individuals who frequently integrate multiple sensory cues, such as trained musicians and video game players, demonstrate more precise multisensory temporal processing,” reads the study.

An important unresolved question however, and that future research could target, is whether this multisensory advantage – the narrower temporal binding window observed in goalkeepers – stems from the rigorous training they undergo from an early age or a preexisting skill set that initially led them to become goalkeepers.

When asked for an assessment of the study based on their own experience, Jan Fedra, spokesperson for the German Football Association’s development body, DFB Academy, pointed out that the study was “an exciting topic” that goalkeeping coaches were “following with interest”. But it was felt to be too early in the research process, with the influence of training on perception not having been clarified, for the DFB Academy to comment in any more detail.

 

Goalkeepers, above all others, need special cognitive skills

 

Florian Beck is in little doubt about the question. The 46-year-old has been the goalkeeping coach for the men’s team at third-division club SV Waldhof Mannheim since the beginning of 2023, and believes the results of the study make perfect sense.

After all, in addition to a certain size and athleticism, for him it is above all the cognitive skills that make a good goalkeeper. “Goalkeepers are constantly scanning the different levels in a game,” he told Audio Infos Germany. They not only have to be able to read this from the back, so to speak, but also always have an eye on the overall situation and reposition themselves accordingly. If the situation becomes dangerous because the opponent is approaching the red zone, goalkeepers block out a lot of things and develop tunnel vision.”

“As soon as the attacking player’s foot goes towards the ball and he lunges, the goalkeeper scans the movement very carefully and looks: ‘What is the hip shape like? What is the foot shape, and what is the position of the player?’ ”

Goalkeepers are able to understand the necessary information about the probable trajectory of the ball in the milliseconds before the opponent’s foot even hits the ball. Goalkeeping coach Beck clearly considers the visual perception to be the decisive factor, which makes the importance of auditory stimuli fade into the background. On this point, he therefore contradicts the study’s thesis that goalkeepers must be able to concentrate on the sound of the ball being played as well as on what they see.

 

Keepers tune out the background noise

 

The following also applies: while you can still hear the shot during training, this is often no longer possible during matches in a stadium. With tens of thousands of spectators, the background noise is simply too high, and increasingly so when a player approaches the opponent’s goal. Beck also knows from his experience, and that of his goalkeepers, that they completely block out acoustic stimuli, such as the background noise in the stadium. It is not that he considers that auditory signals have no meaning on the pitch, but that the sound context is different to what the study presents. .

“Although goalkeepers completely block out the background noise in the stadium, they are perfectly capable of perceiving important acoustic signals,” says Beck. To illustrate this, he cites the example of a goalkeeper being approached by a striker. At this dangerous moment, the goalkeeper is completely focused on the visual. But if a defender then comes in to defend and shouts to the goalkeeper, for example, whether he should block the further or nearest corner, he is very aware of this.

 

 

 

 

 

Training specifically promotes the sharpening of both senses

 

The importance that both senses have separately for the professional is reflected in the special training that he regularly carries out to strengthen them. The fact that each person has a dominant eye to which the other is directed can cause problems for goalkeepers in particular. They can misjudge the trajectory of crosses from the left or right, which is why Beck pursues the following objective: for his goalkeepers, the left eye should be dominant for a cross from the left and the right eye for a cross from the right. To make both eyes equally strong, the goalkeepers train alternately with an eye patch.

And Beck applies the same principle to the ears by using earplugs. There is no doubt in his mind that it is extremely important for goalkeepers to be able to perceive different sensory stimuli separately, and to classify them correctly.

Source: Audiology News UK issue 14 May-June 2025