The Beginning of Senior Career in Team Sport Is Affected by Relative Age Effect

Abstract

Many previous studies in national team sports did not report evidence about relative age effect (RAE) in senior categories. This study aimed for the first time to determine if the RAE may specifically affect the early, but not the late, phase of senior career in elite team sports. A total of 3,319 birthdates (basketball: n = 642; rugby: n = 572; soccer: n = 1318; volleyball: n = 337; water polo: n = 450) of elite senior players were analyzed. Senior players with an age lower or equal to the 25° percentile of age were considered as early phase players while the others as late phase players. Separate Poisson regression models were applied to investigate the RAE in each sport (overall, and for early phase and late phase subgroups). Considering the overall sample, players born close to the beginning of the year were 1.57, 1.34, 2.69, 1.48, and 1.45 times more likely to reach first and second Italian division of basketball, rugby, soccer, volleyball, and water polo respectively, than those born in the last part of the year. RAE was present in all early phase subgroups. Differently, in the late phase subgroups the RAE was present only in soccer. Data highlighted a bias in the selection of senior teams, which may limit the chance to identify talented players born late in the second part of the year. Italian sport federations should promote the talent development of relatively younger players by equally promoting the joining of young players to senior teams.

“Birthday-Banding” as a Strategy to Moderate the Relative Age Effect: A Case Study Into the England Squash Talent Pathway

“…Because athlete development is a complex and multidimensional process (e.g., Kelly and Williams, 2020 ), it is important to appreciate that there may be other contributing factors that have influenced the balanced BQ distributions throughout the selection levels (e.g., social context, competition level, and the number of active participants; Musch and Grondin, 2001 ). As an example, it has been previously documented that, during a comparison of different youth sports, those with greater popularity often comprise a stronger RAE (Lupo et al, 2019 ). As such, it may be argued that the lower participation levels of squash compared to other sports in England (e.g., soccer) may result in less difficulty during the selection process, and thus, a weaker RAE occurs.…”

Does the Relative Age Effect Influence Short-Term Performance and Sport Career in Team Sports? A Qualitative Systematic Review

“…Other explanations were as follows: lower dropout rate by relatively young players due to a lower number of injuries than relatively older players (Bjørndal et al, 2018a ), self-improvement experiences associated with adversity in selection processes (Collins and MacNamara, 2017 ), high levels of challenge in competition (McCarthy et al, 2016 ), or player recruitment systems (Sims and Addona, 2016 ). However, it should be clarified that the influence of the birthdate in professional sports (RAE vs. RAE reversal) does not yield results in the same direction, depending on factors connected to the sport context (Delorme et al, 2009 ; Lupo et al, 2019 ).…”

The relationship between the relative age effect and performance among athletes in World Handball Championships

“…The analysis confirmed that the RAE had an impact in most sports, both on an individual level and on a team level: for every two subjects born in the last quartile of an age group, more than three of the first quartile of the same age group participated in the same sporting context. The RAE appears to have a large impact on the selection processes associated with TID systems in team sports such as ice hockey [10], basketball [11,12], football [13][14][15], rugby [16], Australian football [17], and handball [18,19]. However, recent research in women´s sports has reported more diverse findings, and the impact of the RAE in these seems to be less extensive [20].…”