The coach of the Italian national football national team Silvio Baldini made his players train holding them … with a blindfolded eye! Is it really a blindfold during training? Here’s what the most recent studies say.
Yesterday, October 7, 2025, the Italian Under-21 national football national team presented itself to a training with a blindfolded eye, at the behest of the coach Silvio Baldini, who already used this approach last year as a club coach with Pescara. The stated goal: to enhance concentration, peripheral perception and reactivity.
An idea that seems to have come out of a laboratory of applied neurosciences, but which actually finds fertile ground in recent sports research. Reducing the visual field forces the brain to rework sensory information, pushing towards more effective strategies in the attack, defense and movement without the ball.
Not a “magic” of the coach, but applied neuroscience
It may seem like an extreme gimmick, but sports science seriously studies what happens if a footballer trains with a blindfolded eye. The hypothesis is that reducing the vision pushes to “feel” better the field and the opponents. A search published on Plos One He involved young players in Small-Sided Games with visual occlusion: the results show changes in the distances between the players, in the running rhythms and in the space behaviors on the ground.
Among the evidence: in larger fields, athletes with occlusion walk more, run less and make fewer successful passages.
How to train the “visual brain”
A study on Under-14 players (Acta Gymnica, 2023) has included technical exercises with visual occlusion in the weekly training: the group that has experienced the bandage has expressed improvements in execution times and less errors compared to the control group.
The authors conclude that this type of training can have a positive impact on technical skills once the normal visual conditions are restored.
Affine techniques, such as training with stroboscopic glasses (intermittent vision training), have given similar results. A twelve -week protocol on university players has shown benefits on static and dynamic balance.
A 2024 meta-analysis published on Sports Medicine shows that also the “temporal occlusion” video-based, that is, the temporary interruption of vision during cognitive tasks, improves visual anticipation and motor precision in different sports.
Because it is important (and “warnings for use”)
Vision is the primary sensor of the movement. By limiting it, the interaction between sight, touch and proprioception is strengthened. In many experiments, athletes with visual occlusion show more controlled movements, improved timing and adaptations in motor models, because the brain “forced” to adapt active complementary paths.
These techniques do not want to replace (obviously) traditional training, but to introduce a perceptual constraint that stimulates sensory and motor plasticity.
However, experts underline how the method must be applied with caution: always in controlled environments, without contrasts, to avoid collision risks due to reduced vision.
