Face of success

Your face tells a lot about you. It can reveal if you have just been a touch overzealous in consuming a cake with chocolate icing. It can, of course, reveal if you are happy, sad, or anything in between. Traces of chocolate around the corner of a mouth and eyes crinkled with the effort of a smile are things that we can consciously interpret but in the subliminal world of evolutionary revelation there are things revealed by a face that you need research to discover. One such discovery has been made recently and it relates to face shape and success on the soccer pitch.

Soccer, or “football” depending on where you are on the planet, is a major estimated to be played by around 256 million people and the high levels are watched by many more than that. One German consultancy firm recently estimated that the English Premier League competition alone is watched by around 4.7 billion people each year. Now that is popularity. It will be of no small amount of interest then that the face shape of a player can reveal how likely that player is to score a goal.

To arrive at their conclusions researchers looked at the face width-to-height ratio (FWHR) for 1,000 players from 32 countries who competed in the 2010 World Cup. The FWHR is calculated by measuring the distance between the cheekbones and dividing it by distance between the mid brow (between the eyebrows) and the upper lip. So a higher FWHR indicates a wider face.

The analysis of performance cross-referenced with FWHR showed that players with high FWHRs (wider faces) were more likely to commit fouls, assist in goals, and score goals themselves.

This study is not isolated in the sense that high FWHR has also been associated in previous research with aggressive behaviour, antisocial behaviour, unethical behaviour, greater success among CEOs, and greater achievement among US presidents.

Face width of course is reflecting hormonal exposure in the womb and the theory goes that greater testosterone exposure is causing the wider face and the changes in behaviour and performance that follows. Aggression is not without its place, and we are not mere victims of our physiology and biochemistry, but you may want to tread carefully around some wide-faced men and of course, any wide-mouthed frogs you come across.