My daughter is November and her and an August born are only 2 of 18 from Q3/4 16 players from Q1-2. This is ECNL. So I’m sure it’s different for other leagues.
ECNL leagues I’m willing to bet Q4 makes up around 5-15% of teams.
Anonymous wrote:For those who have boys in MLS Next, how much international play do those teams actually do? What benefit does that league particularly get by being aligned with international play?
I feel like for every domestic youth league (leaving out national teams for the moment) except MLS Next, school year cutoff is the clear winner. For MLS Next, I could see why they would resist if they play a lot of international matches or are sending players to Europe as pros when they turn 18.
Winner at what? What's the real measurable benefit?
Measurable benefits favoring school year alignment: higher overall participation rates, higher overall retention rates, improved relative age effect profile, decreased club operations workload (after year 1), decreased college recruiter workload, decreased time off training for the trapped subset and/or decreased cost for private training during that time, decreased team disruption at U18-19.
Have there been any measurable benefits from the switch to calendar year with increased international alignment? I'm willing to entertain even the most remotely plausible theory of a measurable benefit. No one seems willing to attempt to articulate one. It would seem that if there were some measurable benefit, the easiest place to identify it would be MLS Next.
Saying measurable benefits and proving measurable benefits are two different things.
You're doing a lot of 'sounds nice' not based on facts and reality.
There's a lack of participation issue because of BY?
Won't there still be kids who are the youngest if you move from Jan1 to September 1? (August becomes the new December)
If you reject the circumstantial nature of the participation, retention, and RAE studies over the last 8 years, fine. The trends are indeed "facts and reality," but the cause cannot be said to be birth year cutoffs with certainty. In the face of those though, you'd think someone would be floating some alternative explanations.
Hypothetically, if I'm a US Soccer decision-maker about to go into a meeting on this issue, what are my arguments in favor of birth year? Scouring this thread, I only can find (1) saying 2010 is simpler than saying 2028, (2) that birth year is the status quo, and (3) a blanket denial of proposed benefits to school year. International alignment for the sake of itself, without a proposed benefit, is unlikely to convince those in favor of the change. Is there anything more convincing I should take into that meeting?
So you solution to RAE is shift the late developers from Dec, Nov, Oct to June, July, August?
RAE has gotten worse since the change. Q4 is less represented in youth club soccer than it was prior to the change. RAE profiles as kids age up are no longer being evened out as they age. Participation and retention rates are also down since the change, with Q4 accounting for an outsized portion of that decrease. Hypothesis presented is that this is a result of the change to birth year. Is there an alternative explanation? The reasoning for the hypothesis is that introducing the social and operational challenges of being across grade level are causing the permanent departure of Q4 kids from organized soccer. They are no longer sticking with it while waiting for their physical maturity to catch up. If there is no alternative explanation, are there countervailing benefits that should be weighed against this?
RAE is not getting better/worse since the change. It exists and will exist regardless of where you draw the cutoff. If Aug 1 becomes the cutoff, then RAE will impact may/June/July birthdays and they will become underrepresented because they are 10-12 months behind others in the age group developmentally.
You can make an argument about retention rates and using birth year, but RAE in itself doesn't change depending on where you draw the line - someone will always be the oldest in a 12 month window and someone will have to be the youngest.
It's hard to find an exact apples-to-apples RAE comparison before and after the switch. But comparing girls ECNL before the switch with all female club soccer and female talent ID centers after the switch, Q4 representation before the switch started HS ages at about 15% and went up each year, stabilizing at 20%. Now, Q4 representation starts HS ages between 10-15% and bounces up and down, never going above 15% and no upward trend through ages. While RAE strictly "exists" in both sets, I think it's fair to say RAE is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon - it can be "worse" or "better." A steeper negative slope from Q1 percent to Q4 percent could be called "worse." By this definition, it has gotten worse since the change.
At the extreme, if one set showed 94% Q1 and 3/2/1% Q2-4, that would be "worse" than a set showing 35/30/20/15%. If you consider those the same, because they both show RAE, I guess we just agree to disagree.
Statistically the comparison of Q4 representation before and after a switch is not the right comparison. The correct comparison is the representation rates in the last three months of each age group, i.e., how is representation is Oct/Nov/Dec birth dates now versus representation in May/June/July birth dates after a school year switch.
Yes, if it wasn't clear, that was the comparison - Q4 before switch (May-Jul) against Q4 after switch (Oct-Dec). If you search for the recent study, the one they are discussing in the ECNL podcast, it's "Relative age effect across talent identification process of youth female soccer players in the United States," Finnegan et al., 2024.
Female youth data from before the switch showed a more balanced representation of Q1 (Aug-Oct) and Q4 (May-Jul) across all ability levels. When just looking at a more elite subset (ECNL), Q4 was lower. Q4 would start at about 15% at U13 and tick up 1% each age group, showing that some late-bloomers were moving up to more elite teams. At the very highest level, national senior teams, RAE was gone or even reversed, in what was termed the "underdog effect." The idea was that those who did succeed against the odds during development years were more likely to be among the very best at the end of the journey.
After the switch, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) is not represented across all club levels near 25%, but rather bouncing around below 15%. That would support the proposition that whereas the old Q4 (May-Jul) girls continued participating at less elite levels during the early years, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) girls simply quit the sport. Youth national teams have higher Q4 representation than all club, which tends to show that those Q4 (new) girls who do stick with it are more likely to be good. The underdog effect is still most likely there too, but it's hard to see because the senior team's Q1-Q4 don't line up with the younger age groups as they are across the date for the switch in 2017.
Now, this could all be because Q1 participation rate has grown, rather than Q4 participation rate having gone down. But there are other studies showing overall participation rate going down since the change. If it's my job to both grow the game and improve our senior national teams, I'm looking at this study thinking "oh, crap." We have lowered overall participation, and done so mostly through pushing out Q4 girls. Underdog effect would tell me that those girls could be particularly important for the senior team. I'm left hoping that the Q4 girls who are dropping aren't the same ones who are my eventual "underdogs."
You’re adding your own opinions into Finnegan’s findings.
Finnegan basically found that Talent ID at the YNT level was much better than at NT Camps and even more so at Club. The player pool (Club) remained the same, each tier filtered. It has nothing to do with underdog effect - the YNT players were included in the YNT Camp pool, which was included in the club pool.
The only takeaway, and one of the major points of the study, is the TALENT ID gets better as you scale upward, AND that the RAE is a non factor at the highest level, but is a significant factor at the Club level.
Anonymous wrote:For those who have boys in MLS Next, how much international play do those teams actually do? What benefit does that league particularly get by being aligned with international play?
I feel like for every domestic youth league (leaving out national teams for the moment) except MLS Next, school year cutoff is the clear winner. For MLS Next, I could see why they would resist if they play a lot of international matches or are sending players to Europe as pros when they turn 18.
Winner at what? What's the real measurable benefit?
Measurable benefits favoring school year alignment: higher overall participation rates, higher overall retention rates, improved relative age effect profile, decreased club operations workload (after year 1), decreased college recruiter workload, decreased time off training for the trapped subset and/or decreased cost for private training during that time, decreased team disruption at U18-19.
Have there been any measurable benefits from the switch to calendar year with increased international alignment? I'm willing to entertain even the most remotely plausible theory of a measurable benefit. No one seems willing to attempt to articulate one. It would seem that if there were some measurable benefit, the easiest place to identify it would be MLS Next.
Saying measurable benefits and proving measurable benefits are two different things.
You're doing a lot of 'sounds nice' not based on facts and reality.
There's a lack of participation issue because of BY?
Won't there still be kids who are the youngest if you move from Jan1 to September 1? (August becomes the new December)
If you reject the circumstantial nature of the participation, retention, and RAE studies over the last 8 years, fine. The trends are indeed "facts and reality," but the cause cannot be said to be birth year cutoffs with certainty. In the face of those though, you'd think someone would be floating some alternative explanations.
Hypothetically, if I'm a US Soccer decision-maker about to go into a meeting on this issue, what are my arguments in favor of birth year? Scouring this thread, I only can find (1) saying 2010 is simpler than saying 2028, (2) that birth year is the status quo, and (3) a blanket denial of proposed benefits to school year. International alignment for the sake of itself, without a proposed benefit, is unlikely to convince those in favor of the change. Is there anything more convincing I should take into that meeting?
So you solution to RAE is shift the late developers from Dec, Nov, Oct to June, July, August?
RAE has gotten worse since the change. Q4 is less represented in youth club soccer than it was prior to the change. RAE profiles as kids age up are no longer being evened out as they age. Participation and retention rates are also down since the change, with Q4 accounting for an outsized portion of that decrease. Hypothesis presented is that this is a result of the change to birth year. Is there an alternative explanation? The reasoning for the hypothesis is that introducing the social and operational challenges of being across grade level are causing the permanent departure of Q4 kids from organized soccer. They are no longer sticking with it while waiting for their physical maturity to catch up. If there is no alternative explanation, are there countervailing benefits that should be weighed against this?
RAE is not getting better/worse since the change. It exists and will exist regardless of where you draw the cutoff. If Aug 1 becomes the cutoff, then RAE will impact may/June/July birthdays and they will become underrepresented because they are 10-12 months behind others in the age group developmentally.
You can make an argument about retention rates and using birth year, but RAE in itself doesn't change depending on where you draw the line - someone will always be the oldest in a 12 month window and someone will have to be the youngest.
It's hard to find an exact apples-to-apples RAE comparison before and after the switch. But comparing girls ECNL before the switch with all female club soccer and female talent ID centers after the switch, Q4 representation before the switch started HS ages at about 15% and went up each year, stabilizing at 20%. Now, Q4 representation starts HS ages between 10-15% and bounces up and down, never going above 15% and no upward trend through ages. While RAE strictly "exists" in both sets, I think it's fair to say RAE is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon - it can be "worse" or "better." A steeper negative slope from Q1 percent to Q4 percent could be called "worse." By this definition, it has gotten worse since the change.
At the extreme, if one set showed 94% Q1 and 3/2/1% Q2-4, that would be "worse" than a set showing 35/30/20/15%. If you consider those the same, because they both show RAE, I guess we just agree to disagree.
Statistically the comparison of Q4 representation before and after a switch is not the right comparison. The correct comparison is the representation rates in the last three months of each age group, i.e., how is representation is Oct/Nov/Dec birth dates now versus representation in May/June/July birth dates after a school year switch.
Yes, if it wasn't clear, that was the comparison - Q4 before switch (May-Jul) against Q4 after switch (Oct-Dec). If you search for the recent study, the one they are discussing in the ECNL podcast, it's "Relative age effect across talent identification process of youth female soccer players in the United States," Finnegan et al., 2024.
Female youth data from before the switch showed a more balanced representation of Q1 (Aug-Oct) and Q4 (May-Jul) across all ability levels. When just looking at a more elite subset (ECNL), Q4 was lower. Q4 would start at about 15% at U13 and tick up 1% each age group, showing that some late-bloomers were moving up to more elite teams. At the very highest level, national senior teams, RAE was gone or even reversed, in what was termed the "underdog effect." The idea was that those who did succeed against the odds during development years were more likely to be among the very best at the end of the journey.
After the switch, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) is not represented across all club levels near 25%, but rather bouncing around below 15%. That would support the proposition that whereas the old Q4 (May-Jul) girls continued participating at less elite levels during the early years, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) girls simply quit the sport. Youth national teams have higher Q4 representation than all club, which tends to show that those Q4 (new) girls who do stick with it are more likely to be good. The underdog effect is still most likely there too, but it's hard to see because the senior team's Q1-Q4 don't line up with the younger age groups as they are across the date for the switch in 2017.
Now, this could all be because Q1 participation rate has grown, rather than Q4 participation rate having gone down. But there are other studies showing overall participation rate going down since the change. If it's my job to both grow the game and improve our senior national teams, I'm looking at this study thinking "oh, crap." We have lowered overall participation, and done so mostly through pushing out Q4 girls. Underdog effect would tell me that those girls could be particularly important for the senior team. I'm left hoping that the Q4 girls who are dropping aren't the same ones who are my eventual "underdogs."
You’re adding your own opinions into Finnegan’s findings.
Finnegan basically found that Talent ID at the YNT level was much better than at NT Camps and even more so at Club. The player pool (Club) remained the same, each tier filtered. It has nothing to do with underdog effect - the YNT players were included in the YNT Camp pool, which was included in the club pool.
The only takeaway, and one of the major points of the study, is the TALENT ID gets better as you scale upward, AND that the RAE is a non factor at the highest level, but is a significant factor at the Club level.
In short, your club coaches suck at talent id.
Actually, RAE has already had an impact before the older higher levels.
The filtering has already occurred.
How will this work for the reverse trapped player. For example, Nov 2011 BD, but is going into 8th grade this year and 9th grade for the 25-26 season. If they are moved down to play with the older 2012s and younger 2011s per the SY change, they would be in 9th grade playing high school, but also have the 8th grade ECNL season to repeat. Do they play both? or pick one?
Anonymous wrote:How will this work for the reverse trapped player. For example, Nov 2011 BD, but is going into 8th grade this year and 9th grade for the 25-26 season. If they are moved down to play with the older 2012s and younger 2011s per the SY change, they would be in 9th grade playing high school, but also have the 8th grade ECNL season to repeat. Do they play both? or pick one?
I'm confused. Your kid is currently playing with primarily kids in their grade in school? If they are good enough for their current team you shouldn't be forced to play down.
Yes - Nov birthday but didn't hold her back in school so she is young for her grade. She is already playing with kids in her grade. I agree that the best result would be that she continues on her team. I didn't know if ECNL would enforce the cutoff dates and keep her from playing on her current team or not.
Anonymous wrote:Yes - Nov birthday but didn't hold her back in school so she is young for her grade. She is already playing with kids in her grade. I agree that the best result would be that she continues on her team. I didn't know if ECNL would enforce the cutoff dates and keep her from playing on her current team or not.
In the current ecnl rules the age groups are described born on or after 1/1/20XX. "Players may play for their own age group and for "older" age groups. "
That's the rule today, there is no reason for that to change other than the date.
If this change were to happen it would not be as disruptive as the change 10 years ago. Older players on teams will not be forced to play their age they can stay on their current teams and play up.
Anonymous wrote:Because rec leagues are done grade wise, it makes sense that the switch to calendar year for travel+ leads to girls dropping out entirely.
Our rec league is by birth year. So are many others.
Anonymous wrote:For those who have boys in MLS Next, how much international play do those teams actually do? What benefit does that league particularly get by being aligned with international play?
I feel like for every domestic youth league (leaving out national teams for the moment) except MLS Next, school year cutoff is the clear winner. For MLS Next, I could see why they would resist if they play a lot of international matches or are sending players to Europe as pros when they turn 18.
Winner at what? What's the real measurable benefit?
Measurable benefits favoring school year alignment: higher overall participation rates, higher overall retention rates, improved relative age effect profile, decreased club operations workload (after year 1), decreased college recruiter workload, decreased time off training for the trapped subset and/or decreased cost for private training during that time, decreased team disruption at U18-19.
Have there been any measurable benefits from the switch to calendar year with increased international alignment? I'm willing to entertain even the most remotely plausible theory of a measurable benefit. No one seems willing to attempt to articulate one. It would seem that if there were some measurable benefit, the easiest place to identify it would be MLS Next.
Saying measurable benefits and proving measurable benefits are two different things.
You're doing a lot of 'sounds nice' not based on facts and reality.
There's a lack of participation issue because of BY?
Won't there still be kids who are the youngest if you move from Jan1 to September 1? (August becomes the new December)
If you reject the circumstantial nature of the participation, retention, and RAE studies over the last 8 years, fine. The trends are indeed "facts and reality," but the cause cannot be said to be birth year cutoffs with certainty. In the face of those though, you'd think someone would be floating some alternative explanations.
Hypothetically, if I'm a US Soccer decision-maker about to go into a meeting on this issue, what are my arguments in favor of birth year? Scouring this thread, I only can find (1) saying 2010 is simpler than saying 2028, (2) that birth year is the status quo, and (3) a blanket denial of proposed benefits to school year. International alignment for the sake of itself, without a proposed benefit, is unlikely to convince those in favor of the change. Is there anything more convincing I should take into that meeting?
So you solution to RAE is shift the late developers from Dec, Nov, Oct to June, July, August?
RAE has gotten worse since the change. Q4 is less represented in youth club soccer than it was prior to the change. RAE profiles as kids age up are no longer being evened out as they age. Participation and retention rates are also down since the change, with Q4 accounting for an outsized portion of that decrease. Hypothesis presented is that this is a result of the change to birth year. Is there an alternative explanation? The reasoning for the hypothesis is that introducing the social and operational challenges of being across grade level are causing the permanent departure of Q4 kids from organized soccer. They are no longer sticking with it while waiting for their physical maturity to catch up. If there is no alternative explanation, are there countervailing benefits that should be weighed against this?
RAE is not getting better/worse since the change. It exists and will exist regardless of where you draw the cutoff. If Aug 1 becomes the cutoff, then RAE will impact may/June/July birthdays and they will become underrepresented because they are 10-12 months behind others in the age group developmentally.
You can make an argument about retention rates and using birth year, but RAE in itself doesn't change depending on where you draw the line - someone will always be the oldest in a 12 month window and someone will have to be the youngest.
It's hard to find an exact apples-to-apples RAE comparison before and after the switch. But comparing girls ECNL before the switch with all female club soccer and female talent ID centers after the switch, Q4 representation before the switch started HS ages at about 15% and went up each year, stabilizing at 20%. Now, Q4 representation starts HS ages between 10-15% and bounces up and down, never going above 15% and no upward trend through ages. While RAE strictly "exists" in both sets, I think it's fair to say RAE is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon - it can be "worse" or "better." A steeper negative slope from Q1 percent to Q4 percent could be called "worse." By this definition, it has gotten worse since the change.
At the extreme, if one set showed 94% Q1 and 3/2/1% Q2-4, that would be "worse" than a set showing 35/30/20/15%. If you consider those the same, because they both show RAE, I guess we just agree to disagree.
Statistically the comparison of Q4 representation before and after a switch is not the right comparison. The correct comparison is the representation rates in the last three months of each age group, i.e., how is representation is Oct/Nov/Dec birth dates now versus representation in May/June/July birth dates after a school year switch.
Yes, if it wasn't clear, that was the comparison - Q4 before switch (May-Jul) against Q4 after switch (Oct-Dec). If you search for the recent study, the one they are discussing in the ECNL podcast, it's "Relative age effect across talent identification process of youth female soccer players in the United States," Finnegan et al., 2024.
Female youth data from before the switch showed a more balanced representation of Q1 (Aug-Oct) and Q4 (May-Jul) across all ability levels. When just looking at a more elite subset (ECNL), Q4 was lower. Q4 would start at about 15% at U13 and tick up 1% each age group, showing that some late-bloomers were moving up to more elite teams. At the very highest level, national senior teams, RAE was gone or even reversed, in what was termed the "underdog effect." The idea was that those who did succeed against the odds during development years were more likely to be among the very best at the end of the journey.
After the switch, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) is not represented across all club levels near 25%, but rather bouncing around below 15%. That would support the proposition that whereas the old Q4 (May-Jul) girls continued participating at less elite levels during the early years, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) girls simply quit the sport. Youth national teams have higher Q4 representation than all club, which tends to show that those Q4 (new) girls who do stick with it are more likely to be good. The underdog effect is still most likely there too, but it's hard to see because the senior team's Q1-Q4 don't line up with the younger age groups as they are across the date for the switch in 2017.
Now, this could all be because Q1 participation rate has grown, rather than Q4 participation rate having gone down. But there are other studies showing overall participation rate going down since the change. If it's my job to both grow the game and improve our senior national teams, I'm looking at this study thinking "oh, crap." We have lowered overall participation, and done so mostly through pushing out Q4 girls. Underdog effect would tell me that those girls could be particularly important for the senior team. I'm left hoping that the Q4 girls who are dropping aren't the same ones who are my eventual "underdogs."
You’re adding your own opinions into Finnegan’s findings.
Finnegan basically found that Talent ID at the YNT level was much better than at NT Camps and even more so at Club. The player pool (Club) remained the same, each tier filtered. It has nothing to do with underdog effect - the YNT players were included in the YNT Camp pool, which was included in the club pool.
The only takeaway, and one of the major points of the study, is the TALENT ID gets better as you scale upward, AND that the RAE is a non factor at the highest level, but is a significant factor at the Club level.
In short, your club coaches suck at talent id.
Actually, RAE has already had an impact before the older higher levels.
The filtering has already occurred.
That isn’t true. That’s an assumption based on “this is what it looks like at my club.”
At the highest level the data shows an age distribution across birth quarters that is in line with expectations from normal distribution - not from the selected pool. Read the study.
Anonymous wrote:For those who have boys in MLS Next, how much international play do those teams actually do? What benefit does that league particularly get by being aligned with international play?
I feel like for every domestic youth league (leaving out national teams for the moment) except MLS Next, school year cutoff is the clear winner. For MLS Next, I could see why they would resist if they play a lot of international matches or are sending players to Europe as pros when they turn 18.
Winner at what? What's the real measurable benefit?
Measurable benefits favoring school year alignment: higher overall participation rates, higher overall retention rates, improved relative age effect profile, decreased club operations workload (after year 1), decreased college recruiter workload, decreased time off training for the trapped subset and/or decreased cost for private training during that time, decreased team disruption at U18-19.
Have there been any measurable benefits from the switch to calendar year with increased international alignment? I'm willing to entertain even the most remotely plausible theory of a measurable benefit. No one seems willing to attempt to articulate one. It would seem that if there were some measurable benefit, the easiest place to identify it would be MLS Next.
Saying measurable benefits and proving measurable benefits are two different things.
You're doing a lot of 'sounds nice' not based on facts and reality.
There's a lack of participation issue because of BY?
Won't there still be kids who are the youngest if you move from Jan1 to September 1? (August becomes the new December)
If you reject the circumstantial nature of the participation, retention, and RAE studies over the last 8 years, fine. The trends are indeed "facts and reality," but the cause cannot be said to be birth year cutoffs with certainty. In the face of those though, you'd think someone would be floating some alternative explanations.
Hypothetically, if I'm a US Soccer decision-maker about to go into a meeting on this issue, what are my arguments in favor of birth year? Scouring this thread, I only can find (1) saying 2010 is simpler than saying 2028, (2) that birth year is the status quo, and (3) a blanket denial of proposed benefits to school year. International alignment for the sake of itself, without a proposed benefit, is unlikely to convince those in favor of the change. Is there anything more convincing I should take into that meeting?
So you solution to RAE is shift the late developers from Dec, Nov, Oct to June, July, August?
RAE has gotten worse since the change. Q4 is less represented in youth club soccer than it was prior to the change. RAE profiles as kids age up are no longer being evened out as they age. Participation and retention rates are also down since the change, with Q4 accounting for an outsized portion of that decrease. Hypothesis presented is that this is a result of the change to birth year. Is there an alternative explanation? The reasoning for the hypothesis is that introducing the social and operational challenges of being across grade level are causing the permanent departure of Q4 kids from organized soccer. They are no longer sticking with it while waiting for their physical maturity to catch up. If there is no alternative explanation, are there countervailing benefits that should be weighed against this?
RAE is not getting better/worse since the change. It exists and will exist regardless of where you draw the cutoff. If Aug 1 becomes the cutoff, then RAE will impact may/June/July birthdays and they will become underrepresented because they are 10-12 months behind others in the age group developmentally.
You can make an argument about retention rates and using birth year, but RAE in itself doesn't change depending on where you draw the line - someone will always be the oldest in a 12 month window and someone will have to be the youngest.
It's hard to find an exact apples-to-apples RAE comparison before and after the switch. But comparing girls ECNL before the switch with all female club soccer and female talent ID centers after the switch, Q4 representation before the switch started HS ages at about 15% and went up each year, stabilizing at 20%. Now, Q4 representation starts HS ages between 10-15% and bounces up and down, never going above 15% and no upward trend through ages. While RAE strictly "exists" in both sets, I think it's fair to say RAE is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon - it can be "worse" or "better." A steeper negative slope from Q1 percent to Q4 percent could be called "worse." By this definition, it has gotten worse since the change.
At the extreme, if one set showed 94% Q1 and 3/2/1% Q2-4, that would be "worse" than a set showing 35/30/20/15%. If you consider those the same, because they both show RAE, I guess we just agree to disagree.
Statistically the comparison of Q4 representation before and after a switch is not the right comparison. The correct comparison is the representation rates in the last three months of each age group, i.e., how is representation is Oct/Nov/Dec birth dates now versus representation in May/June/July birth dates after a school year switch.
Yes, if it wasn't clear, that was the comparison - Q4 before switch (May-Jul) against Q4 after switch (Oct-Dec). If you search for the recent study, the one they are discussing in the ECNL podcast, it's "Relative age effect across talent identification process of youth female soccer players in the United States," Finnegan et al., 2024.
Female youth data from before the switch showed a more balanced representation of Q1 (Aug-Oct) and Q4 (May-Jul) across all ability levels. When just looking at a more elite subset (ECNL), Q4 was lower. Q4 would start at about 15% at U13 and tick up 1% each age group, showing that some late-bloomers were moving up to more elite teams. At the very highest level, national senior teams, RAE was gone or even reversed, in what was termed the "underdog effect." The idea was that those who did succeed against the odds during development years were more likely to be among the very best at the end of the journey.
After the switch, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) is not represented across all club levels near 25%, but rather bouncing around below 15%. That would support the proposition that whereas the old Q4 (May-Jul) girls continued participating at less elite levels during the early years, the new Q4 (Oct-Dec) girls simply quit the sport. Youth national teams have higher Q4 representation than all club, which tends to show that those Q4 (new) girls who do stick with it are more likely to be good. The underdog effect is still most likely there too, but it's hard to see because the senior team's Q1-Q4 don't line up with the younger age groups as they are across the date for the switch in 2017.
Now, this could all be because Q1 participation rate has grown, rather than Q4 participation rate having gone down. But there are other studies showing overall participation rate going down since the change. If it's my job to both grow the game and improve our senior national teams, I'm looking at this study thinking "oh, crap." We have lowered overall participation, and done so mostly through pushing out Q4 girls. Underdog effect would tell me that those girls could be particularly important for the senior team. I'm left hoping that the Q4 girls who are dropping aren't the same ones who are my eventual "underdogs."
You’re adding your own opinions into Finnegan’s findings.
Finnegan basically found that Talent ID at the YNT level was much better than at NT Camps and even more so at Club. The player pool (Club) remained the same, each tier filtered. It has nothing to do with underdog effect - the YNT players were included in the YNT Camp pool, which was included in the club pool.
The only takeaway, and one of the major points of the study, is the TALENT ID gets better as you scale upward, AND that the RAE is a non factor at the highest level, but is a significant factor at the Club level.
In short, your club coaches suck at talent id.
Actually, RAE has already had an impact before the older higher levels.
The filtering has already occurred.
That isn’t true. That’s an assumption based on “this is what it looks like at my club.”
At the highest level the data shows an age distribution across birth quarters that is in line with expectations from normal distribution - not from the selected pool. Read the study.
So RAE impacting soccer participation rates at younger ages (and youth soccer participation is decreasing) and the highest levels of soccer being more evenly distributed by birth month are not in conflict with each other as they can independently occur.
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