There was a paper in Nature where scientists did magnetic imaging of the brain of grandmaster chess players, as well as of advanced amateur players. They found

There was a paper in Nature where scientists did magnetic imaging of the brain of grandmaster chess players, as well as of advanced amateur players. They found that when evaluating a move, for grandmasters the frontal and parietal cortices had gamma bursts, whereas for amateurs the medial temporal lobe had gamma bursts. This tends to indicate that when grandmasters evaluate a move they are accessing their memory, whereas an amateur evaluating a move is reasoning about it. I would guess that the same holds true in soccer. https://www.nature.com/articles/35088119 https://www.nature.com/articles/35088119