As Stuart Pearce's England Under-21 team hope for victory over the Czech Republic on Sunday in Viborg to reach the knockout stages of Euro 2011, the Football Association is preparing a step change in how young players begin their career after studies revealed that children born in summer are far less likely to be selected for clubs' academies. According to the FA, for the 2008-09 season 57% of players at Premier League academies were born between September and December, while 14% had their birthday between May and August.
The Premier League recognise the significance of these statistics and Ged Roddy, the director of youth, wants to educate more coaches and clubs about what is termed the "relative age affect".
Tottenham Hotspur now tailor the scouting and development of their future stars to ensure a player's talent – rather than his birthday or size – is his most important characteristic. Uefa have also conducted research into the issue this year. Barcelona, considered the world's best club side, have a policy of investing in technically astute players and at Ajax Johan Cruyff plans to transform how the club coaches young players.
Whereas in Uefa competitions and the rest of European club football age selection runs from January to December, in England the period is September to August. Andy Roxburgh, Uefa's technical director, told the Observer: "Take the [current] European Under-17 competition. We tested this – approximately 75% of the players were in the January to April category. To put it another way, if you're born on the 26 or 27 December you've got a problem getting selected for national youth teams.
"At the club level [you must] have open-mindedness. You used to get all this stuff from the scouts, don't bring me back a centre-half unless he's 6ft 1in. That means [Carlos] Puyol [the captain] wouldn't get a game for Barcelona. Pep Guardiola told me the Barcelona philosophy, what their criteria was when dealing with their academy boys. What they try to develop first of all is a work-family ethic. The second thing [is] fast technique. You have to be very quick and technically gifted. The best example is [Lionel] Messi. When he went to Barcelona he had to have injections because he had a growth problem.
"The point is having the technical eye to bypass things like age and size to say: 'We're dealing with talent. We've got a gift and this gift will become something if we nurture it.' Barcelona remained patient with Messi as they did with Andrés Iniesta, Xavi Hernández. You wonder what would have happened to these boys if they'd been playing in certain leagues in Europe."
Nick Levett, the FA's national development manager, said: "For the 2009 season 57% of kids at Premier League academies were born September to December; and 14% were born in May-August. Where are the May to August kids? The simple fact is that adults have voted them out of the game because of our desire to pick bigger, stronger, faster players. We're looking at changing grass-roots [local clubs] football to run January to December. We know from research that we'll [still] get a bias in January to April kids [being chosen by scouts] but it does mean then that the 'summer borns' are the middle group for club football and the end group for school football. So they're not age disadvantaged for everything.
"We also need to look at the pitch sizes. We need smaller age appropriate pitches [that] will less benefit the physical player and more benefit for the technical player."
The FA hope to implement the changes for the 2013-14 season. "The best talent spotter is able to spot the player with most potential for the future and not necessarily the player having the biggest impact in the team at the moment," John McDermott, the head of the Tottenham academy, says. "At Tottenham we've introduced strategies to try and combat the bias [which include] putting the seven-, eight-, nine- and 10-year-olds together, therefore a player moves up to the older group on his birthday. In that way he experiences being the youngest and eldest as the year progresses.
"Tom Carroll, an outstanding prospect, trains regularly with our first team and is on loan at Leyton Orient [but] he couldn't cope physically in matches with his own age group as he was a late developer and [had a] summer birthday. But he had outstanding perception, technique and aerobic capacity.
"Of the [many] boys out on loan recently, Ryan Mason [Doncaster Rovers], Harry Kane and Carroll [Orient], Nathan Byrne [Brentford], Danny Rose [Bristol City], Jake Nicholson [MyPa], Kyle Walker [Aston Villa], and Andros Townsend [Millwall] are all summer babies."
At Ajax, Cruyff, who should be confirmed as a director in August, plans a new philosophy at the club. "You can say: 'OK it's a problem of the age. Or its a problem of the way the kids are trained,'" says Ruben Jongkind, who coaches at the club's academy. "If you take this perspective you have to change the structure of the academy. How do you do this? From a philosophical point of view it's [about] focusing more on the individual then the team and looking at biological age. When Johan Cruyff comes this change will be made."
