Relationship between date of birth, skeletal age, and anthropometric characteristics in adolescent elite soccer players. Paper presented at the 12th Annual Congress of the ECSS 2007. Relative age effects and technical skills 55

In the selection during adolescence, coaches evaluate the technique, physique, and physiological ability and decide if a player has the ”talent ” to become a professional soc-cer player. However, some researchers have criticized that selection during adolescence has shown a bias towards date of birth and late maturing players have been systemat-ically excluded. Yet there has been no study that indicates whether those born later in the selection year do actually mature later. The aim of this study is to clarify the relation-ship between the date of birth, skeletal age, and anthropo-metric characteristics in adolescent elite soccer players. The subjects of this study were 466 adolescent soccer play-ers aged between 9.3 and 15.8 years (13.0±1.8 years) who belonged to the J-league Academy. They were di-vided into three categories, U12, U15, and U18, whic