Scanning: Why Information Comes Before Decisions

A player gets the ball with a teammate standing free a few yards away, and never turns their head to find them. With young players you'll see it over and over in a single game. Sometimes the ball is taking all their attention. A lot of the time they just never looked.

The Fundamentals of Soccer Coaching names perceiving as the part of perceive, decide, execute that gets the least attention in most training. The first three articles here were about the other two: STEP shapes what a player has to decide, and the Coaching Intervention Wheel shapes how you coach around it. This one is about the first part, and it means being a bit more precise about what "perceiving" is.

The research on it also has an awkward result at the very top. When researchers compared Champions League award-winners with elite teammates in the same team, the same match and the same line, the best players didn't scan any more than the others. If the best players in the world don't scan more than the very good players around them, it's worth being clear about what you're coaching when you coach scanning to a nine-year-old.

Perceiving as something a player does

Treating perceive, decide, execute as three stages a player moves through in order is a useful shorthand, and it's also not quite how the researchers behind the constraints-led approach, the same body of work STEP draws from, think about it. Ecological dynamics, the line of research running from James Gibson's work on perception through to Keith Davids and colleagues, treats perceiving and acting as one coupled process, not a sequence where perceiving finishes and then hands off to a decision. A player doesn't take in a picture, pause, then choose from a menu. They're reading the game and acting on it at the same time, continuously.

That sounds like an academic distinction until you look at what the research on perceiving in soccer studies. It doesn't study a mental process at all. It studies a movement.

Scanning is something a body does, which is what makes it useful to a coach. You don't need a separate tool to reach inside a player's head. A head turn is something you can see, count, and build a game around, the same way STEP builds in decisions. The three-stage language stays useful for talking about a session, but what you're coaching in the perceiving part of it is a head turn.

What the research shows

Aksum, Jordet and colleagues fitted four elite midfielders (aged 17 to 23) with eye-tracking glasses through real 11v11 matches and measured 869 individual scans. They averaged about four-tenths of a second, nine in ten were under two-thirds of a second, and only around 2% involved the eyes fixing on anything. A glance was enough (Aksum et al., PLOS ONE, 2021). Scanning is a habit of quick, repeated checking rather than a long look.

A separate study looked at 53 outfield players across the U17 and U19 European Championship finals. The U19s scanned more than the U17s, players who scanned more completed more passes, and tight pressure cut scanning down: the closer the opponent, the less a player checked before dealing with the ball (Aksum et al., Journal of Sports Sciences, 2021).

The youngest players I've found in this research are high-level U13s at a Bundesliga club, tested in a passing machine rather than a match. Those who turned their heads more before the ball arrived completed passes faster, and turning their heads while already on the ball slowed them down (McGuckian et al., Science and Medicine in Football, 2020).

Then the Champions League study. Award-winning players and their elite teammates, matched on team, match and line, showed no meaningful difference in how much they scanned, or in their performance (Science and Medicine in Football, 2024). One reading is that among players who all scan a lot, scanning stops being what separates them.

What the research can't tell you

The limits are worth having in one place, because together they shape what you should take from all this.

• Age. All of it is high-level players aged 13 and up. I haven't found any study measuring scanning in grassroots 8-to-10-year-olds.
• Cause. It's all correlation. None of these studies show that scanning more causes better play. Better players might scan more partly because good ball control frees their eyes up to look around. The imagery study further down is the closest thing to a test of cause, and it has five players.
• What a head turn misses. Players pick things up in peripheral vision too, and head-turn counts don't see that. A head turn is the part of perceiving you can observe and design for, not the whole of it.

What survives all three is a direction, not a target. Scanning grows through development and pressure suppresses it. And across the studies from U13 to U19, the thing linked with better passing is looking before the ball arrives, while head turns once a player already has it went with slower passing in the U13 study. That's a more useful coaching point than "scan more," and it's one you can see in a nine-year-old without any equipment.

Why younger players probably scan less

This part is extrapolation, not a finding. If scanning climbs from U17 to U19, it's a reasonable bet it's lower still at 8, and working memory is one likely reason. A scan competes for the same limited attention as everything else a young player is holding in mind: where to run, what to do with the ball, what the coach just said. Working memory keeps growing through childhood, and a player who's still using most of their attention just to control the ball has less left over to spend looking away from it. That's the same base-level point Why Your Soccer Practice Feels Like Chaos makes: if the ball still needs all of a player's attention, work on the ball comes first, or at least alongside. First Touch and Receiving picks that up.

That's not a reason to skip scanning at the youngest ages. It's a reason not to expect a seven-year-old to check over both shoulders the way a professional midfielder does, and not to read the absence of that as a discipline problem.

Building it into the game instead of asking for it

"Look up!" from the sideline is instruction, and instruction is one tool on a wider menu, not the one I'd rely on to build a habit. My default is the same logic that runs through STEP: build a game where the player has to check, rather than one where you remind them to.

That isn't the only route with evidence behind it. In one small study, five elite academy players did six weeks of imagery work, rehearsing scanning in their heads away from the pitch, and their scanning in games went up, especially the central midfielders (Pocock et al., Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2019). Five older academy players is a long way from a team of eight-year-olds, but it's a useful reminder that scanning can be shifted more than one way.

A few ways that show up on a field:

• Make the picture change behind them. A neutral player, a bonus zone, or a gate that only opens for part of the game means the right answer isn't fixed — it has to be checked, because it isn't there every time.
• Reward finding the overload. If a switch of play into an open side of the pitch scores double, as it does in the Switch of Play game from Why Your Soccer Practice Feels Like Chaos, a player has a reason to look for it before receiving, not just after they're already in trouble.
• Set a rule that only pays off if you looked first. A touch limit set to what your players can manage, or a goal that only counts if the scoring player receives with their body already open to the far side, forces the information-gathering to happen before the ball arrives, not after.

Each of these is a condition rather than an instruction: the same Task and Equipment levers from STEP, aimed at a different target.

If you want one ready to run, here's the Switch of Play game as a one-page activity sheet.

What good scanning looks like in younger players

Skip the number. There's no verified frequency for an 8-year-old to hit, and inventing one would be worse than not giving one. What you can watch for instead: does a player check before the ball arrives, or only after? A player who only looks once they already have the ball is at least looking, which is a start. In the U13 study, though, head turns on the ball went with slower passing, so the next step is moving that look earlier, before the ball arrives. The frequency and timing elite players show in the research is a picture of where this goes, not a bar for an eight-year-old to clear.

Where this leaves perceive, decide, execute

STEP still handles deciding. The Coaching Intervention Wheel still handles what happens around the execution. Perceiving doesn't need a framework of its own. On the field it's scanning, and I train it the same way the rest of these articles build a session: design the environment so the behavior you want is the one that works.

Next session, pick one small-sided game and just watch. Before the first five players receive a pass, count how many of them turn their head first. That's your starting point, not a study's number.

Common questions about scanning in soccer

What is scanning in soccer? A head or body turn away from the ball to check what's around before the ball arrives — where teammates and opponents are, and what space is open. Elite players do it constantly, in glances that usually last well under a second, not long stares.

Can young players be taught to scan? I haven't found a study testing it with players as young as 8 to 10. With older academy players, a small study found six weeks of imagery work increased scanning. My own approach is game design: build practices where checking your surroundings pays off, rather than repeating "look up" from the sideline.

How often should a young player scan before receiving the ball? There's no verified number for players this age. The research on scanning frequency comes from high-level players aged 13 and up. For a younger player, checking once before the ball arrives, even briefly, is real progress. Frequency is something to build toward, not something to expect early.

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This is part one of Before the Decision, a series on what a player needs before a game can teach them to decide. It picks up the "perceiving" part of The Fundamentals of Soccer Coaching. Continue with Teach It or Let the Game Teach It?. See Why Your Soccer Practice Feels Like Chaos for the environment-design thinking this builds on, and How Much Should You Actually Say? for where instruction fits.