The relative importance of play, practice and soccer-related skills in childhood on the later success of elite soccer players
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been continued discussion about the relative importance of early sport diversity and play-type activities in childhood and its relation to later success in sport. In this study we evaluated whether these activities (in addition to other more traditional measures of practice and skill) successfully differentiated elite soccer players who subsequently attained professional (PRO) status at age 16 yr (n=26) from those that did not (RELEASED, n=76). These players were initially evaluated ~3 yr prior to being retained or released (see Hendry et al., 2014). At that time we asked for retrospective estimates of hours in organized practice and “play” (i.e., soccer activities outside of organized practice) during childhood (5-12 yr) and across their careers, demographics pertaining to start age and involvement in other sports, and coach ratings of tactical, technical, physical and creative skill. Players that subsequently attained professional status began practicing in an elite soccer academy earlier (Mpro =9.54 yr, SD = 2.18; Mreleased = 11.38, SD = 2.10, t(100) = 3.82, p<.001) and participated in fewer sports (Mpro = 4.17, SD = 1.69; Mreleased = 5.41, SD = 2.72, t(100) = 2.00, p <.05) than their peers. Binary, logistic regression analysis on the practice data showed that only hours in soccer practice significantly predicted group membership. With respect to the evaluation of skills, only technical skill was a significant predictor of group membership. Despite previous literature, we did not find any evidence that play or diversity were predictors of later success. In fact, the successful players engaged in fewer sports in childhood than their less successful peers. In contrast and more in line with early predictions of deliberate practice theory, early access into an elite Academy, coupled with high amounts of formal practice, were the best predictors of early adulthood sport expertise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".