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Defying the odds: the relative age effect's absence among the best teenage football players in the world

Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The relative age effect (RAE) is the advantage of being born earlier in the selection period, thus being more experienced and more developed. It has been suggested that, among the best athletes, the RAE may become inverted because younger players have to adopt different strategies and develop different skills in order to overcome the RAE. Recently, the CIES Football Observatory selected the world's 200 best teenage football players, using objective measures such as minutes played – weighted by sporting level, transfer value, and an in-game performance index. That sample proved ideal for testing whether they truly differ from the top performers in youth competitions, and whether an inverse RAE could exist among athletes at the absolute top level. In my study, the distribution of birth quartiles among the 200 CIES's list players were compared with the corresponding distributions among players participating in the two most recent FIFA U-20 World Cups. Also, it was tested whether any of the distributions differed from an even distribution between the quartiles. The results showed that while no RAE existed among the CIES players, RAEs clearly emerged in both FIFA U20WCs. Also, the birth quartile distributions, among the CIES's 200 differed significantly from both the 2025 FIFA U20WC players, χ 2 = 36.2303, p < .001, and the 2023 FIFA U20WC players, χ 2 = 19.5995, p < .001. Thus, while the RAE is known to be advantageous to those competing at the highest level of youth football, there is no indication that it has helped the group of players who have developed into top-level senior players before the age of twenty.
DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1926690
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,353
OpenAlex ID: W7163529735
FWCI:
Cites: 26
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Related to: 10