Hi, this is Ray.

If you're reading this in the middle of June 2026, there's roughly a 70% chance you've watched at least one World Cup match in the past 48 hours. The tournament is in full swing across the US, Canada, and Mexico. Group stage drama. Underdog upsets. Players you've never heard of suddenly becoming household names. The collective global attention to this thing is genuinely staggering… billions of people watching the same matches at the same time, learning the names of strangers from countries they've never visited, becoming temporarily expert in offside rules and tactical formations.

I love the World Cup. Not in the casual "I'll check the scores" way, but in the full "I have rearranged my schedule and am yelling at the TV about a substitution decision" way. I'm watching this tournament as a fan, like millions of others.

But I'm also watching it, increasingly, as a student of learning. Because the players you're watching aren't just elite athletes. They're some of the most carefully-trained human beings on the planet, the product of development systems that have spent decades refining how to take a six-year-old kicking a ball in a yard and turn them into someone who can perform under impossible pressure in front of a billion people. The methods these players use to get good are not magic. They're learning techniques. And almost every one of them is something you can adapt for whatever YOU'RE trying to learn… a language, an instrument, a profession, a craft, a hobby that's been stalled for years.

Today's newsletter is about that. The specific things World Cup players do to get that good, the research that confirms why those things work, and how you can steal their playbook for your own learning. Let's get into it.

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Let me start with the most fundamental thing professional footballers do that most amateur learners don't. Their practice has structure, purpose, and explicit targets. It is, in the technical sense, deliberate practice.

According to a comprehensive analysis of female professional soccer players, deliberate practice is characterized by activities performed with the purpose of improving performance (and not necessarily to generate enjoyment) and require a high cognitive and/or physical effort, besides being positively associated with the development of specific abilities. The key phrase is "with the purpose of improving performance." Not playing for fun. Not getting reps in. Not "putting in the hours." Practicing specific things with specific improvement goals.

When Kylian Mbappé does a training session, he's not just running around the pitch. There's a session plan. Specific skills being worked on. Specific weaknesses being targeted. Specific decisions being practiced. Coaches are observing and providing feedback. Sometimes the work focuses on a particular movement, a particular type of pass, a particular tactical scenario. The work is structured to produce specific improvements that the next session builds on.

Compare this to how most adults practice their hobbies and skills. They show up. They do the thing for an hour. They leave. There's no plan. There's no specific target. There's no feedback. They've put in time, sure, but they haven't put in deliberate practice. And the gap between time-in and deliberate-practice-in is enormous. The research is unambiguous: hours of unstructured practice produce a fraction of the improvement that hours of deliberate practice produce.

The steal for your learning: before each practice session, decide what specifically you're working on. Not "I'm going to study Spanish for an hour." But "I'm going to spend 30 minutes on the past subjunctive, which I know is my weakest area, then 20 minutes on listening comprehension at slightly above my current level, then 10 minutes reviewing yesterday's vocabulary." The specificity is the difference. The plan is the difference. World Cup players don't show up to training without a plan. Why should you?

There's a popular narrative about elite athletes that involves obsessive specialization from age 4 onward. The reality, when you look at the research, is more nuanced and more useful for adult learners.

According to research on developmental pathways of professional players, professional soccer players in England follow an early engagement pathway during childhood and early adolescence, but the two groups of players engaged in four other sports, suggesting greater diversification than previously reported for soccer players. Even the future professionals played other sports. They started engaging with their main sport early, but they weren't single-mindedly focused on it to the exclusion of everything else.

This is important because it pushes back on the "you have to start at 3 to be great" narrative that paralyzes a lot of adult learners. The "early" matters, but "engaged early" doesn't mean "exclusive early." The cross-training in other sports actually appears to support development in the main sport, by building broader athletic and cognitive capabilities.

The steal for adult learners: it's never too late to engage seriously with something, and you don't have to make it the only thing you do. The football players who became professionals started young but didn't quit everything else. You can pick up a serious learning project at 35 and not give up your other interests. The diversification doesn't hurt the focus… it often supports it. I covered this in the hobbies-and-learning newsletter, but it shows up again in the elite sports research. Multiple interests work together, not against each other.

Here's a finding from the football research that genuinely changed how I think about practice. According to one study, elite players spent more time in decision-making activities during team practice, possessed higher levels of motivation and had greater parental support, with weekly and accumulated hours spent in soccer team practice most consistently discriminating between skill levels across age cohorts. The elite players didn't just practice the mechanics more. They practiced the decisions more.

This is a subtle but important distinction. Lots of amateur players can do the basic mechanical skills… pass, dribble, shoot. What separates elite from sub-elite isn't usually the mechanical execution. It's the decision-making. WHEN to pass. WHERE to pass. WHICH option to take when three are available. WHAT to do when the defender does X instead of Y. The decisions are where the game is actually played, and the elite training systems spend disproportionate time training exactly that.

A study of Brazilian professional female players made this concrete. According to the researchers, engagement in deliberate practice in soccer and futsal, especially during childhood and early adolescence, is related to a better quality of offensive decision-making skills, and elite male youth soccer players who showed faster decision-making skills had better game reading ability by using more efficient visual search strategies and showed less cognitive effort to make decisions. The elite players see the game faster, decide faster, and use less mental energy doing it… because they've practiced the decision-making, not just the mechanics, for thousands of hours.

The steal for your learning: in whatever you're learning, identify the decisions, not just the mechanics. If you're learning programming, it's not just typing code (it's deciding what approach to take, when to refactor, when to ship, when to stop. If you're learning to write, it's not just typing words) it's deciding what to include, what to cut, where to start, where to end. The mechanics will plateau quickly. The decisions will keep getting better for years if you train them deliberately. Spend time on the decisions, not just the execution.

This one should be obvious, but its implications for adult learners are profound. Every World Cup player you're watching has spent their entire developmental arc working with coaches. Not "took a class once." Not "watched a YouTube video." Worked extensively with coaches who could see things they couldn't see in their own play, identify weaknesses, design corrective practice, and provide ongoing feedback.

According to one major review, the value of coaching in elite development is so well-established that coach-led team practice is arguably closest to deliberate practice in team sports, and grittier players accumulated more time in coach-led team practice, which in turn predicted the skill level. The presence of a coach changes the practice from time-in to development-in. The coach is what makes deliberate practice possible at scale.

This is the part where adult learners get uncomfortable. Most of us try to learn things alone. We watch YouTube. We buy books. We use apps. We assume we'll figure it out. The research on elite development is fairly clear that this approach has hard limits. There's a level of competence you can reach alone. Beyond that level, you need someone who can see what you can't see and direct your practice in ways you can't direct yourself.

I covered this in the "find someone to learn from" newsletter, but the World Cup makes it concrete. None of those players got to that level alone. They all had coaches. Many of them still have multiple coaches… a head coach, a specialist coach for their position, a fitness coach, sometimes a mental performance coach. The infrastructure of human guidance is part of what produces elite performance.

The steal for your learning: invest in coaching at strategic moments in your learning. You don't need a coach forever, and you don't need an expensive one. But periodic engagement with someone who knows the domain better than you, who can diagnose weaknesses you can't see, and who can prescribe targeted practice… this is one of the highest-ROI investments any serious learner can make.

A particularly interesting strand of the soccer research has examined the cognitive demands of elite play. According to one study, engagement in competition and practice was rated as high in physical and cognitive effort by all, yet ex-academy players reported higher levels of physical effort during early adolescence, and cognitive effort during late adolescence. The transition from sub-elite to elite involves an increasing proportion of cognitive load relative to physical load. The body is necessary but not sufficient. The cognitive game (reading the play, anticipating, deciding under pressure) becomes increasingly important at the higher levels.

This is why modern football academies don't just train players physically. They train pattern recognition, decision-making under pressure, tactical understanding, video analysis of opponents, mental performance, and recovery practices. The elite player is a cognitive athlete who also happens to have an elite body.

The steal for learners: the cognitive aspects of your learning probably deserve more attention than you've been giving them. If you're learning a language, are you just doing vocabulary drills, or are you training the meta-skills of reading native content, listening to fast speech, processing in real-time? If you're learning to code, are you just writing syntax, or are you training the higher-order skills of system design, debugging strategies, and code review? The mechanics are necessary but not sufficient. The cognitive game is where the higher levels live.

Here's something the casual viewer of World Cup matches doesn't see. The players you're watching for 90 minutes spend the rest of their lives in elaborate recovery protocols. Sleep optimization. Hydration management. Specific nutrition. Cold plunges and saunas. Massage and physiotherapy. Light training days. Carefully managed match load.

Why? Because the research on elite performance is unambiguous: recovery isn't separate from training. It's part of training. The improvement happens during recovery, not during the work itself. Push too hard without recovering and performance degrades. Recover well and the previous training session's investment actually pays off.

The steal for your learning: I've covered this extensively in previous newsletters… sleep, hydration, exercise, real food, time off. The World Cup players take these so seriously that they have entire teams of professionals managing them. You don't have those professionals. But you can apply the same principles. Sleep is non-negotiable. Hydration matters. Real food matters. Days off are part of the work, not breaks from it. Treat the foundations the way elite athletes do, even at a fraction of the scale.

A 2022 study of 388 elite youth soccer players found something interesting about what differentiates elite from sub-elite, beyond just hours of practice. According to the researchers, the predictive strength of deliberate practice weakens considerably when it comes to differentiating between differently skilled experts, leaving a way clear for other non-practice related factors to exercise their influence, and grit predicts expertise level both directly and indirectly… grittier players accumulated more time in coach-led team practice, which in turn predicted the skill level. Grit (the capacity to sustain effort toward long-term goals despite setbacks) was a significant differentiator at the elite level.

This connects to the patience and resilience newsletters I've written before. The World Cup players didn't just have talent. They had the durability to keep showing up, year after year, through injuries, through bad performances, through losses, through times when their careers seemed over. The grit was part of the talent. Maybe most of the talent.

The steal for learners: the long-term project of learning anything hard requires not just good technique but the durability to keep going. Most learning projects don't fail because of bad technique. They fail because the learner quits before the techniques have had time to work. Build the durability deliberately. The skill of staying in is itself a skill, and it's trainable.

Here's what I want you to take from watching this tournament. The players you're watching are extraordinary, but the methods that produced them aren't mysterious. Deliberate practice with specific targets. Coaching that catches what you can't see. Disproportionate time on decision-making, not just mechanics. Training both body and mind. Aggressive recovery. The capacity to keep going when most people would have quit.

Every one of these is something you can apply to whatever you're trying to learn. You won't become a Mbappé of Spanish vocabulary or a Sam Kerr of Python coding. But you can absolutely become much, much better than you currently are at whatever it is, if you steal the methods that produced the players on your screen.

The World Cup is a great show. It's also, if you watch it the right way, the world's most expensive demonstration of evidence-based skill development. Three weeks of it. Live. With commentary. Free.

If you've been stuck on something you've been trying to learn, the players you're watching this month have things to teach you that go way beyond football. The pitch is the laboratory. The matches are the experiments. The methods are the deliverable. Take them home and use them. Your learning will be better for it.

Even Gandalf trained. Wizards don't just spontaneously generate. They put in the reps. So do World Cup players. So can you.

Keep learning (and enjoy the matches),

Ray