More and more footballers are playing chess It started as a trend, now it's a tool to read the game better

Dani Carvajal has practically become addicted over the last year, during the long rehabilitation period he had to go through. Pep Guardiola and other coaches study it to improve their tactical vision. Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are shown playing it in a legendary Annie Leibovitz shot from 2022 for a Louis Vuitton advertisement. It's the game of chess, a passion that an unexpected number of footballers have taken up in their free time as a counterbalance to the hectic life. Born in the 7th century in India, chess spread over time across the globe, captivating people of all kinds. Today many footballers see it above all as a release valve that is not an end in itself but useful, for example, to improve concentration and to eliminate accumulated stress.

Carvajal and the Spanish tradition

The aforementioned captain of Real Madrid has said he became fanatical about it after the terrible knee injury he suffered in October 2024. During the 10 months of recovery this game became a lifeline for him, helping him counter the frenzy to get back on the pitch and giving him the right calm to return at his best without negativity taking over. The more than 4,500 games played online chased away bad thoughts and crises, with Carvajal even ending up passing this passion on to his physiotherapist.

David Raya, goalkeeper for Arsenal, is the one who introduced him to the game and can take much of the credit for the full-back's recovery. The chess club he belongs to within the Spanish national team is large and of good quality, so it's not hard to imagine a chessboard appearing in the hotel rooms of La Roja during this break. The most skilled seems to be Unai Simón, goalkeeper for Athletic Club, followed by Dani Olmo, with the Barcelona forward considering it a game that helps manage space on the pitch, and Martín Zubimendi, the new Arsenal midfielder.

From the Premier League to France

Among the Gunners we find captain Martin Ødegaard and Eberechi Eze. The latter last season won an online celebrity tournament in the final against YouTuber Sapnap, a few days after reaching the FA Cup final with Crystal Palace. Other English internationals like Anthony Gordon of Newcastle and Alexander-Arnold appreciate the reasoning and focus involved in moving the pieces, while Mohamed Salah, former teammate of the full-back at Liverpool, says he has literally become addicted. Gerard Piqué's entrepreneurial streak, a great fan of the game, has pushed him to organize and sponsor various tournaments in recent years.

The French contingent of players with a chess hobby includes world champions Giroud, Coman, Kanté and Griezmann, to which Michael Olise should now be added, a worthy successor to the Bleus' chess tradition. The Bayern Munich star can also play it in Bavaria with Joshua Kimmich and Harry Kane, who became fascinated by this mental game after watching The Queen's Gambit. This 2020 Netflix miniseries, which tells the story of a prodigy girl named Beth Harmon, was a turning point for the game, sparking a chess-mania during the Covid-19 pandemic when people, forced into lockdown, had to spend a lot of time at home.

And in Serie A?

Also in Serie A we find big fans of the game. At the top of the list is Christian Pulisic, who even tattooed the queen piece on his left arm, accompanied by the word Mate, the name of his paternal grandfather who passed this passion on to him as a child. In an interview with Magnus Carlsen, one of the greatest chess players in history who is, among other things, under contract with St. Pauli's chess team, the AC Milan forward shares that matches in both sports are often decided by mistakes caused by lapses in concentration. Henrikh Mkhitaryan plays chess to improve game reading and various match situations, Taty Castellanos has been fond of it for 4 or 5 years, while Paulo Dybala as a boy competed in provincial and then national tournaments up to the age of 18. Staying in Argentina, it is impossible not to mention Diego Armando Maradona, who played chess matches against sacred monsters like Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov, and promoted the sport in the United Arab Emirates.

The Agdestein case

There is no debate about who the strongest footballer in chess is: it's Simen Agdestein, a Norwegian who pursued a dual career in football and chess in the 1980s. A former striker for Lyn Oslo, he earned 8 caps for the Norwegian national football team before retiring at 25 due to a knee injury. On the other board he won the national championship 9 times, becoming a grandmaster at 18. After representing his country simultaneously in two disciplines, he spent years coaching Magnus Carlsen, previously mentioned. Today following Agdestein's footsteps is Dejan Joveljić, a Serbian international with Sporting KC in MLS. The striker ranks in the top 1% of chess players in the world. For him, however, it remains just a hobby, which spread widely during the quarantine to fight boredom.

Examples from the past

Finally, numerous coaches are known for their curiosity and fascination with the movements made on the chessboard. The forerunner was Helenio Herrera, coach of Inter's Grande Inter in the 1960s, who introduced chess courses taught by masters of the discipline during training camps to stimulate players' minds. Pep Guardiola says that in football as in chess, the important thing is to control the center of the pitch and also that on the chessboard, similarly to the green rectangle, you attack on one side, overload and switch to gain an advantage on the other side.

During his sabbatical year after Barcelona, between 2012 and 2013, Guardiola flew to the United States to meet chess legend Garry Kasparov and at the same time studied Carlsen. Enzo Maresca, an adherent of the Catalan coach, dedicated large parts of his Coverciano thesis to the game, entitled "Football and Chess", exploring positional play and strategy. If one then reaches the point where a La Liga team, Elche, directly offers chess lessons to the first team and youth players, the benefits this ancient game has on the tactical and mental aspects of football are confirmed.