Science

Two Queensland evolutionary ecologists are applying lessons from the natural world to spot the next generation of Matildas stars. By Ashley Hay.

Applying lessons from ecology to the beautiful game

Round-ball skills on display.

Credit: Anton Vierieten

It’s late spring in Brisbane on a stretch of football fields wide enough to make the world’s spherical shape look obvious. A trample of teenage girls warm up with foot-based volleying variations as their coaches prepare. On the southern edge of the oval, two ecologists set up their own equipment for the players, spacing four passing boards around a 180-degree angle, a sensor light clicked into each one, rechecking baselines and measurements.

Robbie Wilson, the designer of this equipment, is an evolutionary ecologist and professor at the University of Queensland’s School of the Environment. He’s also the progenitor of research that’s attempting to shake up the art of football talent-spotting.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a zoologist and a professional footballer,” he says. “I kind of found a way to do both.” Wilson’s research ranges from papers about how the loss of their tail impacts the reproductive success of certain skinks (Journal of Herpetology, 1998) and ecological studies of frogs, ants, quolls and crayfish, to recent publications such as “Identifying the best strategy for soccer penalty success” (Journal of Biomechanics, 2022), co-authored with Andrew Hunter, the other researcher on this field.

“Let me start by talking crayfish,” Wilson said when we first discussed his round-ball-based work. “What’s important to them is their little hidey-hole. How do they protect it? They’ve got to be aggressive, show their claws, intimidate opponents. They’ve got to know when to back down and when to escalate… They have tools that help them in the sport of their life.

“Compare that to quolls, who grow as quickly as possible and then, when they reach 11 months and two weeks, need to run around and find as many females as possible. They become long-distance runners for two weeks, running marathons almost every night.”

Each species evolves skills that best indicate how it will survive and thrive in its own ecological niche – crayfish don’t need to run marathons; quolls don’t need pointy claws.

When he first thought of transferring these ecological ideas of specialisation and adaptation to the beautiful game, Wilson was “just curious” about applying the tools he used to study species’ success in nature to a new system. “Football was a system where I could easily quantify athletic capabilities – physical strength, speed, stamina, agility – and the skill-based side. Giving an animal a skill-based task is difficult. You can’t say to a crayfish, ‘Can you grab this with your claws 50 times while I measure your accuracy?’ ”

He began analysing players in his own team, part of a semi-professional competition in South East Queensland – “not only their physical attributes but also how they manipulated these attributes under given circumstances, like control and passing accuracy, dribbling, heading”. It took a long time – recording games, assessing what players did with possession of the ball and how successfully – to define “the signal” for each skill. He found that a player’s physicality wasn’t a good predictor of their success or efficiency in matches.

“Not that physicality wasn’t important,” Wilson notes. “You need a certain speed and fitness to play high-level football.” Rather, what differentiated the best players in terms of impacting games was “what they could do with the ball”.

Yet only a tiny proportion of studies into the game – less than 5 per cent, he estimates – quantified what players did with the ball. Players were rarely assessed on skills that would see them thrive in a team: “the data available is almost all speed, stamina, endurance – how to improve those, how to bring players back from injury”.

This he found “utterly dumbfounding”. “What’s special about football?” he asks. “It’s what players do with the ball. But almost zero research is skill-based at the level of developing players.”

He had the beginnings of a new means of talent identification.

He published his first study in 2016 and travelled to Brazil a couple of years later, working with elite football academies on a methodology that would deliver baseline, skills-based data on their players. “No one there knew I wasn’t a sports scientist,” he says, “and I didn’t talk about crayfish.”

Talent scouts will typically watch a series of 90-minute games “where someone might be lucky to get 20 touches”, says Wilson. In comparison, his tests could start with a pool of, say, 500 players, allocating two minutes to each to screen their dribbling performance.

“Good dribblers are more likely to be good at matches,” he says, “but there’ll be huge variance in that – maybe the best player in matches is only 100th best in dribbling. That’s okay: these first stats give us a signal that correlates with performance in matches … We can get rid of half of the players with 95 per cent certainty that the top 20 match performers are still in the pool.”

For the remaining 250, he can measure passing and control, knocking out another 40 per cent before moving on to one-on-one and three-on-three games to “bring the pool down to 30 or 40 players, with certainty the top 20 players are in there”. This approach moves from rapidly calculating the least predictive traits for team performance (dribbling and passing) to testing more predictive game traits (how a player responds to opponents and works with team mates) that take more time.

Wilson’s suite of five tests delivers data from between 300 and 400 touches per player, creating what he calls “the only proper quantitative talent ID framework in the world of football”. They generate a metric for an individual’s effectiveness in a game irrespective of the position they’re asked to play, and they circumvent the well-known “age effect”, which skews selection of junior players towards those born in the first third of any year.

They’re also a powerful example of left-field collaborations between disciplines, the kind of marriage that, as research by the nascent Dutch Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo) suggests, can deliver not only interesting scientific results but also “new curiosity, joy, enthusiasm and a sense of freedom” for its researchers – at a time of “heavy levels of stress and burnout” among academic staff. CUCo calls this “collateral happiness”.

It’s also a reminder of the American strategist Vannevar Bush’s call, following World War II, for universities to continue their “traditional function” of offering “an opportunity for free, untrammelled study … in the directions and by the methods suggested by [researchers’] interests, curiosity, and imagination” – an ideal many contemporary scientists may not recognise in their working landscape.

For Wilson and Hunter, there’s also collateral happiness in being on a field with next-generation players. The young women running their drills are part of the Queensland state team, and the two ecologists are former players who love being back on the pitch.

“Robbie’s data is quantitative for sure, but it’s qualitative for us as well – it can capture skills and it can also capture a player’s game intelligence,” says Gabor Ganczer, the technical director of female pathways at Football Queensland. Women’s football faces a huge task, he says: having the Matildas host a World Cup creates “high expectations for the next generation. Coaches are turning over every stone and this is a new stone to turn. It’s our next tool, and a great opportunity to do domestic work that complements the Brazilian benchmarks.”

There are already anecdotal successes. The first Brazilian academy Wilson worked with was a leading northern club now owned by Manchester City. The top performer of the 50 under-12s and -13s players he tested was a smaller boy in the lower age group. Last year, the academy’s former head caught up with Wilson and asked if he remembered that player. “He’s 16 years old. He’s the youngest player to debut for that club’s first team and the youngest by a year to score,” he told Wilson. “Now he’s in Manchester. He’s training with Manchester City.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "Naturalist selection".

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