Some of the young players enrolled at PSV Eindhoven’s academy have had to burst balloons. Others have been told to shoot dots, and more still have been tasked with bringing down alien space fleets.
These are hardly the tasks traditionally demanded of teenage soccer prodigies, but then PSV, the Dutch club, does not think of itself as traditional. Most clubs, after all, are concerned only with developing players with nimble feet. PSV, increasingly, is concentrating on nurturing agile minds.
That is why in recent years every player at the club, from the youth system to the reserve squad, has been assessed on at least one of four customized computer programs.