The relative age effect in youth and elite sport: Did 20 years of research make any difference?

In recent decades, our research team (among others) has identified obvious participation and attainment inequalities resulting from annual age grouping procedures across varying forms and levels of sport participation, and the relative age effects (RAEs) associated with it. Generally, youth born early in the selection year have selection and attainment advantages over their relatively younger peers. Twenty years ago, Helsen et al. (1998) observed that 37.9% of soccer players who were transferred from lower league teams to first division teams were born in the first three months of the selection year, while only 12.3% were born in the final three months. Almost a decade ago, Baker et al. (2010) observed that over 35% of players in two amateur developmental ice hockey leagues were born in the first three months of the selection year, while less than 10% were born in the final three months. Over-representation of relatively older players have been consistently observed in a variety of sports (Cobley et al., 2009; Musch & Grondin, 2001). I will discuss the (dis)advantages in selection and attainment that are considered RAEs (Wattie et al., 2008) and how they have changed (or not) over the past 20 years