Scoring a goal: How sports may enhance cognitive and non-cognitive abilities of children. An experimental study of football in Lima  - Peru

This study aims to measure the impact of practicing football on a regular basis on the development of young children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills and other dimensions of well-being. The intervention was implemented by Academia Deportiva Cantolao, a well-known football training school located in Lima, Perú, and was carried out in two training fields located in one of the poorest sector of the city of Lima. Training sessions took place twice per week during weekends, totalizing 15 hours per month of training. The experiment relied on a encouragement design, in which a population of eligible children (those aged 5 to 11 who had not being part of the activities of the school before) was randomly assigned to receive a waiver of the full tuition and activities fees during the period of the study (usual fees were about 38 USD per month, while tuition was about 19 USD per year). Randomization was done stratifying by training field and children's age, with treatment and control groups of equal size. The total sample consisted of 1731 children, divided in two cohorts. The first cohort (1334 children) attended the training sessions during 18 months (from March 2014 to September 2015), while the second one (397 children) attended for 10 months (from November 2014 to September 2015). Additionally, in one of the two training fields the program was implemented, another experiment was carried out. In order to evaluate the importance of different training methods, 528 children assigned to treatment in this training filed were randomly allocated to one of two different training methods: a method that emphasized the development of children’s values and other soft skills, and another method that focused more on the strengthening of physical and technical skills of children (which is the standard approach of Academia Cantolao to organize training sessions)