INTERRELATION BETWEEN RELATIVE AGE EFFECT AND GOAL SCORING INBULGARIAN FOOTBALL
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aim. This study aims to investigate the impact of the relative age effect (RAE) on the performance of footballers, focusing on how birthdate grouping affects goal-scoring success at the highest level of competitive football. Methods. Birth dates of the top five goal scorers from the three highest leagues in Bulgaria (First, Second and Third Division) over the last five years were collected and analyzed. A total of 139 scorers were included. Their dates of birth were categorized into four quarters of the year, and their scoring performances were compared to see if those born in the first quarters had a greater tendency to excel in Bulgarian football. Results. The analysis revealed that 48% of the top scorers in the first division were born in the fourth quarter of the year. This suggests that players born in the first half of the year do not have a clear dominance in scoring at the highest competitive level. Conclusions. The results challenge the conventional assumption that the relative age effect gives a significant advantage to players born earlier in the year. At the highest level of Bulgarian football, there is no clear superiority in goal-scoring for players born in the first half of the year. Keywords: soccer; relative-age effect; goal scorers; Bulgarian leagues; soccer goals.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".