Relative Age Effect in Elite Sports: Methodological Bias or Real Discrimination?
Methodology
2010-01-25 v1 Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Physics and Society
Abstract
Sport sciences researchers talk about a relative age effect when they observe a biased distribution of elite athletes' birthdates, with an over-representation of those born at the beginning of the competitive year and an under-representation of those born at the end. Using the whole sample of the French male licensed soccer players (n = 1,831,524), our study suggests that there could be an important bias in the statistical test of this effect. This bias could in turn lead to falsely conclude to a systemic discrimination in the recruitment of professional players. Our findings question the accuracy of past results concerning the existence of this effect at the elite level.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1001.4070,
title = {Relative Age Effect in Elite Sports: Methodological Bias or Real Discrimination?},
author = {Nicolas Delorme and Julie Boiché and Michel Raspaud},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.4070},
year = {2010}
}