  The widespread popularity of soccer across the globe has turned it into a
multi-billion dollar industry. As a result, most professional clubs actively
engage in talent identification and development programmes. Contemporary
research has generally supported the use of executive functions - a class of
neuropsychological processes responsible for cognitive behaviours - in
predicting a soccer player's future success. However, studies on the
developmental evolution of executive functions have yielded differing results
in their structural form (such as inverted U-shapes, or otherwise). This
article presents the first analysis of changes in the domain-generic and
domain-specific executive functions based on longitudinal data measured on
elite German soccer players. Results obtained from a latent variable model show
that these executive functions experience noticeable growth from late childhood
until pre-adolescence, but remain fairly stable in later growth stages. As a
consequence, our results suggest that the role of executive functions in
facilitating talent identification may have been overly emphasised.
