Why football is short-sighted when it comes to seeing vision’s possibilities (2024)

It is the night before the United States’ opening game of the 2010 World Cup finals, and Jay DeMerit is scared.

Not because of the magnitude of the match against England, or because the Watford centre-back is going to be marking Wayne Rooney. It’s because, with less than 24 hours until kick-off, he is struggling to see.

The problems began nine months earlier when DeMerit, then aged 30, woke up on the morning of a Championship match against Plymouth Argyle with a red and pus-filled eye after he accidentally scratched it with a contact lens on the team bus.

He was unable to play that September evening, and the eye was swollen shut by the time of Watford’s journey back to London. Taken to hospital, DeMerit was diagnosed with a corneal infection. He ended up losing 70 per cent of his eye tissue in just under 48 hours.

“I was captain of Watford, starting for the national team — we’d just beaten Spain,” DeMerit tells The Athletic. “We’re ready to go to a World Cup, and I’m suddenly blind in one eye?”

Emergency surgery saved his sight, although he was confined to a darkened bedroom for three months — except for one trip to a Jay-Z gig in a pirate costume, a fancy-dress outfit chosen so his eye patch would blend in.

All that mattered was making the World Cup, but after the US squad’s arrival in South Africa, things began to unravel once DeMerit had an uncomfortable eyeball stitch removed two days before a warm-up friendly against Australia in Johannesburg.

“Halfway through, I was missing headers, misjudging the ball,” DeMerit says. “By the end of the game, I was just trying to see the man I was marking. I went to the doctor, and my cornea had almost collapsed on itself. The eye doctor said I was legally blind.”

Head coach Bob Bradley still named DeMerit in his starting team to face England a week later, but logistical issues hindered the delivery of specialist contact lenses.

A crisis was only averted five hours before kick-off, thanks to a mad dash involving London doctors, motorcycle couriers, and secret packages.

The United States earned an impressive 1-1 draw after a mistake from England goalkeeper Rob Green, with DeMerit and centre-back partner Oguchi Onyewu crucial to keeping Fabio Capello’s men scoreless after Steven Gerrard’s fourth-minute opener.

“I was freaking out,” says DeMerit. “But I’m also like, ‘This is wild. This is the craziest sh*t I’ve seen in my life’. I got these contacts at 3pm (that day). I played the best game of my life at eight.”

So, how important is eyesight to elite footballers?

Answering this question is personal.

Since birth, I have had extremely limited vision in my left eye, despite surgery and other attempts to strengthen it.

In the early noughties, while sporting a dashing dinosaur-pattern eye patch, I attempted to stumble after a ball on various playing fields. The main memory is of staring up at the sky, the wind knocked out of me, with a bump on my head.

Playing recreational football with, effectively, one eye was hard. Playing professional football seemed impossible.

Gordon Banks reached a similar conclusion, England’s 1966 World Cup winning-goalkeeper ending his top-flight career after suffering a major eye injury in a 1972 car crash.

Another injury, sustained in a childhood accident, could have stopped Dean Shiels.

The former Rangers and Hibernian midfielder enjoyed a 15-year pro career, including 14 senior caps for Northern Ireland. He achieved this despite having the injured eye replaced with a glass one at 19, after leaving Arsenal’s academy.

In 2017, Falkirk players Joe McKee and Kevin O’Hara were given four- and eight-match bans respectively for taunting Shiels, then with Dunfermline, about his disability.

“It was really difficult to compete and be successful,” Shiels, who now manages Dungannon Swifts in Northern Ireland’s Premiership, says. “I played in midfield, where most of the bodies are, where there’s less space to play.

“If you’re playing as a goalkeeper or defender, the players are in front of you, so you can see most of the play. But when you’re a midfielder, you’ve got to turn your body, turn your head, you’re constantly scanning, scanning, scanning.”

Scanning — gathering information while looking away from the ball — is linked with high-quality midfield play.

Arsene Wenger, who oversaw a young Shiels at Arsenal two decades ago, judged players on their scanning frequency, explaining at the 2019 Sport Innovation Summit in Paris how the best will “scan six to eight times in the last 10 seconds before they receive the ball, and the normal players three to four”.

This action is heavily reliant on peripheral vision, as Jude Bellingham, rated as one of football’s top scanners, revealed after scoring a solo goal for Borussia Dortmund against Arminia Bielefeld in October 2020: “With football, you never really see the full picture. Everything is in the periphery of your vision”.

“It’s not like cricket, where everything happens in front of you,” explains Aaran Patel, an optometrist who works with Premier League club Brentford. “In football, you need better peripheral vision. Not so much razor-sharp vision, but a 360-degree outline of what’s occurring.”

Difficult then for a player such as Shiels, whose field of vision is half that of a typical player. But scanning was not the only impediment: “When you’re on the ball, they say the best players can see the whole pitch, spy the long pass. Pep Guardiola says Johan Cruyff told him, ‘When you’re on the ball, look as long and far as you can’. And your vision dictates that.”

Shiels was also told that using only one eye may affect how he times contact with the ball, such as when attempting to head away a cross. DeMerit noted a similar effect.

To address this, the club doctor at Hibernian, Shiels’ club at the time, made contact with Tottenham Hotspur. Dutch international Edgar Davids had signed for the Premier League side in 2005, bringing with him bespoke eyewear he wore during matches because of glaucoma, a condition in which pressure within the eyeball causes blurriness and tunnel vision.

“That was never something I was going to entertain,” says Shiels. “I didn’t want to draw attention to the eyesight, or to myself.”

Instead, he would find his own solution.

Shiels’ story is not unique.

Hannah Hampton, a goalkeeper for England and Aston Villa in the women’s game, has no depth perception. At Manchester United, goalkeeper David de Gea is long-sighted. The Old Trafford club also had Paul Scholes miss most of the 2006-07 season because of a blocked vein in the retina of his right eye, while Ryan Giggs struggled with the peripheral vision on his right-hand side.

On average, optometrists working at clubs have noted that players have better eyesight than the general population, which they put down to lifestyle factors — footballers will be on the training pitch or in the gym, rather than staring at screens for hours.

Encouragingly for those players who do have vision problems, this indicates that above-average eyesight does not confer a significant advantage on whether an individual will become a professional.

Nevertheless, sight deficiencies still present a challenge.

“My view has always been that sport is very simple: Hit the ball, catch the ball, kick the ball,” Amar Shah, an optometrist who has worked with Arsenal as well as the England cricket and rugby union teams, says. “If you can see the object clearer, you’ve got a better chance of doing all of that.”

Professional teams first began to work on vision with optometrists and sport-scientists in the 1990s.

The most high-profile of these is Dr Sherylle Calder, who has worked with three Rugby Union World Cup-winning sides, the Australian cricket team, Formula One driver Valtteri Bottas, and helped Ernie Els win The Open in 2012 at age 42.

In football, she has been hired by Southampton, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Bournemouth, and the Tottenham academy, as well as helping her native South Africa to the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations title.

“Lots of players have great peripheral vision, but are really slow in their responses,” Dr Calder tells The Athletic. “So peripheral vision has a role, but you need information from scanning around you. I call that peripheral awareness — it’s the ability to respond to your peripheral.

“If the eyes take in information early, you have more time on the ball. That’s the basis of Lionel Messi’s performance, for example. Valtteri, he always talks about how when he’s in the car it feels like slow-motion.

“I’ve worked with lots of players with some deficit in their sight — but I don’t specifically work on sight, I work on taking in information. I can improve visual motor performance, and that helps to counter the visual deficit.

“It’s a trainable skill. If a human has a deficit in a certain area, you compensate by hyping the other skills.”

This chimes with Shiels’ experience.

“It was forced,” he admits. “I always had to be aware, to know my next pass, where the opposition was coming from: Simple things I needed in congested areas to overcome my vision.”

Several Premier League teams, including Brentford and Chelsea, use visual training drills to try to develop players’ peripheral awareness. Last summer, Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold told The Athletic about how these drills helped him improve his decision-making on the pitch.

Examples of these are walls fitted with flashing lights, where the participant has to slap each trigger as it glows.

“It’s all about reaction time,” says Brentford optometrist Patel. “If you can be half a second quicker than someone else, that’s an advantage. If you’re sprinting, that gives you five metres.”

Some players, desperate for an edge, have taken this on board.

Frank Lampard worked with a behavioural optometrist during his playing days at Chelsea to help him time his trademark runs into the opposition penalty area. Arsenal goalkeepers Jens Lehmann and Manuel Almunia trialled Nike-made contact lenses specially manufactured to highlight the colours of the Jabulani ball used at the 2010 World Cup.

Shiels relays a story from his former Hibernian manager Tony Mowbray, who was told by Sir Alex Ferguson that Manchester United had Giggs’ eyes tested, feeling his vision was better when moving from left to right than right to left. “They asked him to cut in from the left onto his right foot as a result.”

But, in general, football is being left squinting at the investment made towards training and testing the eyes of athletes in other sports.

A medical before a transfer does not typically include an eye-test, despite the sometimes vast sums of money at play. Due to the ethnic make-up of the Premier League, this can leave large swathes of the top flight exposed. “While most football players shouldn’t have too many problems, there are much higher rates of glaucoma within players of an Afro-Caribbean background — up to eight times more likely,” Patel says.

Additionally, despite the prevalence of studies linking screen use to visual deterioration, today’s players spend more time on phones and other devices.

“We (humans) were never designed to work on small devices, but to look far and be aware of what’s around us,” says Dr Calder. “By looking at these devices, we’re detraining the ability. We’re trying to work in this little environment, so when we get on-field and have to scan, use peripheral awareness, judge, all those skills, they’re harmed.”

As managers search for ‘one-percenters’, pre-game phone use is not banned — yet ketchup is outlawed at some club canteens.

Several optometrists spoken to by The Athletic put football’s lack of interest in the field down to concern over the media blowback they felt they would receive. Comparing the keenness of rugby and cricket to collaborate, former Arsenal optometrist Shah calls football teams “tricky”.

“They are very focused on the negative press that they might get. A few years ago, we were dealing with Ipswich and West Ham, and they were very focused on not wanting any headlines — ‘Blind As Bats,’ that kind of thing.”

As a result, things are missed. Patel raises the issue of training under floodlights. “I can only think of one Brentford player who’s got a lazy or underdeveloped eye,” he says. “This player has said they have issues when it’s floodlit — it’s hard to see things quickly because it’s almost too bright.

“Because teams rarely train in the evenings, it doesn’t give those players a chance to improve their awareness in the dark. It’s only matches (that happen at night).”

Shiels believes that the majority of players will not want to reveal any vision issues they have: “I wouldn’t hide it, but I never felt it was for me to bring up.

“No player wants to show weakness. If they misplace a pass, get caught on the ball, turn into pressure, they don’t want a narrative attached to them that it’s because of their eyesight.

“Lots of players go and get laser treatment privately.”

So, The Athletic asked the experts — how might football look if more attention was paid to players’ vision and visual awareness?

“There are physios, nutritionists, a team doctor, specialists who look at injury prevention,” Patel says. “There will be another pocket which optometry will come into. If you’re able to spot things quicker in the six-yard box, it will have a real impact.

“Also, with academies — kids now start at a young age, when vision is so fluid. If parents are desperate for kids to be a footballer from the age of eight or nine, training their eyesight could really provide a significant difference.”

Research could help care for players post-retirement.

In 2020, scientists at Indiana University in the US linked heading footballs to visual deterioration, finding subconcussive impacts impair neuro-eye function. Rapid eye tests could become a clinical tool for monitoring players’ exposure to the repeated blows linked with the onset of dementia.

However, for the most part, the experts stressed one thing: Poor vision does not preclude you from professional football.

But football is still short-sighted when it comes to seeing vision’s possibilities.

(Photo: Getty Images; graphic: Sam Richardson)