he Irish Under 19 team have just reached the European Championships semi-finals and face a daunting game against Spain on Friday. Like most successful Irish sports teams they’ve had to defy the odds to get this far, but in other respects this team is a perfect mirror of underage sporting statistics.
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In the rather excellent book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (which I am going to pretend to have read for the purposes of this article) the author notes that there are significantly more junior ice hockey players born in the early months of the year. The theory behind this statistical bias is that the chances of succeeding in professional sport are determined at a young age, and at that young age a player turning 9 on 2nd January will have a significant advantage over someone turning 9 on 31st December of that year. The better player is pushed towards superior coaching and more attention from that early headstart and therefore has an improved chance of succeeding.
Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) http://www.freakonomics.com/2006/05/11/maybe-the-world-cup-wasnt-the-best-example/]wrote about a similar phenomenon in soccer in 2006. He observed that while the NHL showed a clear abundance of players born in January to March the same didn’t apply as universally in the 2006 World Cup in Germany. This distortion was explained by the existence of two cut-off rules in soccer: FIFA’s cut-off being 1st January and many national associations using different dates to separate age-groups.
Reviewing the dates of birth of the current Irish Under 19 squad identifies two clusters of players. There are six players (from the squad of 18) born in the first two months of the year, which is twice the expectation from a standard spread. 22% of the players have birthdays in January, which is 3 times the normal spread. The birthdays thin out over late spring and summer until the school year starts again. September and October contribute another six players to the squad. In other words two thirds of the squad have birthdays in one third of the months.
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The high proportion of players born in January is not unexpected. It is consistent with other sports, even when moving away from youths soccer and into professional senior players, and continues a trend from the recent Under 17 World Cup identified by http://11tegen11.wordpress.com/]11tegen11 where only African nations bucked the trend. The increased numbers in late autumn are less easily explained and don’t correlate with the experience of other nations. The small dataset size (Ireland only brought 18 players to this tournament) may be a factor, though it’s likely that the school year start in autumn contributes to the higher numbers in September and October also. A more thorough researcher might also investigate when the cut-off point for underage football in Irelandswitched from August to January but that’s a level of effort out of keeping with the general trend on TFK.
The remaining teams in the competition provide further support to the favouritism towards players born early in the year. In a remarkable consistency across the eight teams competing in Romania this summer, 33% of the players on show were born in the first two months of the year. The trend continues downwards virtually every month with only the Irish influence bloating the autumn figures.
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It seems logical to surmise that this uneven spread of players is detrimental to the natural goal of sporting organisations to gather the best talent available in a nation. There are barriers presented to players born late in the year that may prevent their talents from being identified at development stage and consequently the pool of elite players available is smaller and weaker than it need be. Overcoming this isn’t straightforward obviously. Based on studies mentioned above no countries outside Africa seem capable of achieving an even spread of players across their national squads. Perhaps the real lesson is for prospective parents – hold off on the romance until April 2012.
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