Predicting Accurately If A Child Will Become A Professional Player

Original Article by Doug Reed

Would you be interested in having the most accurate prediction possible for whether your child or player will one day have a professional career in their sport? This article will provide that after investigating what is known about the factors that influence talent development.

There are many factors that we are aware have an impact including motivation, coaching, playing opportunities, time spent practicing, psychological resilience, genetics and family support to name a few. As well as these ones, there are many others that go unrecognized because we don’t realize they have an impact. For example, maybe a feature of their first school is important but is missed and never considered.

In a child’s life some elements of these factors can be controlled and are predictable but some will be highly uncontrollable and unforeseeable. An unfortunate injury or a serendipitous meeting with a coach have an element of chance and can significantly affect a child’s progression.

Even a simple question as whether a change in a factor will have a positive or negative effect is not always certain as it depends on complex contextual circumstances. More family support may enable the possibility to take advantage of opportunities. Conversely, it could make everything too effortless or add excessive pressure, causing motivation to diminish.

Having the genetics for early maturation may make them stand out enough to gain entry into an elite training program. It can also lead to a reliance on superior physical attributes and a neglect of developing sufficient technical skills. Within the same person at one age the effect could be positive but at another time it is negative.

Determining the size of the impact from any change is also complicated. It could have anything from no consequence to huge repercussions as each factor interacts with the others and there can be cascading effects. It is like a small pebble being thrown into a pond and the ripples spread the disturbance.

Imagine a child of average ability hears a story of someone who was just like them and went on to become a superstar. This fuels their motivation to practice really hard with the belief they can become one of the best. That improvement is just enough to be accepted into a talent development program. With access to high quality coaching, they are able develop their talent to the level needed to make it to the top.

This is a very simplified example of a ‘sliding doors’ moment named after the film of how a small inconsequential change can take someone’s life on a completely different and unpredictable path. A related concept is the butterfly effect. It is named after the theory that a flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a tornado on the other side of the world.

The weather provides a good analogy for talent development. They are both complex systems that have many interrelated factors. This makes it practically impossible to foresee how they will evolve.

Meteorologists observe current atmospheric conditions to very accurately predict what the weather will be tomorrow. A few days out and the accuracy dramatically drops but there is still some reliability. However, the current observations have no predictive value for whether it will be sunny or wet day in one month’s time.

This is comparable to talent development. With a 10 year old child, their ability today gives a reasonably accurate indication of how good they will be as an 11 year old and some rough idea how they’ll be at 13 years old. But, observing their talent today, offers almost no insight to where they will be at 23 years old.

Any Exceptions?

There may be a consensus it’s difficult for most children but surely for special talents, such as football’s Messi or basketball’s Michael Jordan, their future success is obvious. Watching YouTube highlights of Messi at a very young age he clearly displayed extraordinary skill. It seems his later success was inevitable.

But many videos of similar young ‘Messis’ have never been heard of again. At 17 years old, just a few years before he was picked 3rd in the NBA draft, Jordan was not included in the Top 20 High School prospects in North Carolina.

The mistake we all commit about believing we could have foreseen the future for Messi or Jordan is because we only see the superstar who went on to meet expectations. We are unaware of or have forgotten the many young prodigies who failed.

The lack of understanding doesn’t end there and goes much deeper. Not only are we uncertain about the future but also about the past. Examining the background of individual elite athletes it seems intuitive why they succeeded.

Messi became unique because his growth disorder forced him to compensate with exceptional skill and then he later caught up through medical intervention. Or was it the early futsal experiences that laid the foundation for his talent? Could the key have been Argentina’s neo-liberal policies in the 1990s as Goal website suggests?

It could have been all of these things or just a part of them. Other unknown factors could have been key like the earlier example of the first school attended. Alternatively, he could have become the same player irrespective of all of these.

The fact is we just don’t know even if we don’t like to admit our ignorance. The confidence of definitive explanations based on well-reasoned narratives, given with the benefit of hindsight, is misplaced. It may seem like we know but, again, there will be many other overlooked cases who didn’t become professionals with similar genetic gifts and upbringings (nature & nurture).

The stratospheric levels of genius reached by Messi and Jordan probably required a near perfect materialization of all the relevant factors, even those that seemed negative at the time. The circumstances falling right probably wasn’t the case for those ‘Next Messis’ or Top 20 High School Prospects in North Carolina back in 1981.

Right from the very beginning of the lives of Messi and Jordan, their future superstar status was in jeopardy from the flip of a coin. They had a 50% chance of being female and the sad truth is that a female athlete, at that time, could not have had the opportunities or impact they had. Highlighting the potential reverberating effects, would we have had Kobe Bryant or Lebron James without Jordan who they cite as their inspiration?

If predicting two youngsters who went on to be the greatest ever in the history of their respective sports is not clear, imagine how little idea we have for others.

The Third Unknown

So far, I’ve only covered genetic or environmental factors, as frequently discussed in nature vs nurture debates, but there might be some other unknown influencing as well.

Researchers studied a unique species of cloned crayfish that were situated in strictly controlled identical conditions. Despite controlling for genetics and environment, they showed huge differences in their size, behaviour and lifespan. The reason for this remains a mystery but one possibility is it is due to some random element.

The knowledge on talent development is captured in the words of a former American politician when he said;

“there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

The complexity of human performance is evident even with fully mature adults. Many player transfers at senior level under or over perform expectations even with the reference of a proven track record in a similar context. Predicting future performance, especially when we’re talking years ahead and a child yet to physically and psychologically mature, is at best exceptionally challenging, if not, impossible.

The research supports this uncertain view of talent development with studies showing the relationship between being talented at a young age and being talented as an adult is very weak. We should not be surprised if the most and least talented players in a team at 10 years old could have switched places several years later.

The only relevant research we have is at the aggregate level, suggesting certain aspects are correlated to becoming an elite athlete such as being a younger sibling or experiencing a setback. But this is useless information for a specific individual. It’s the same as knowing out of all the youth players how many approximately will go to be professionals but that doesn’t help us identify which ones will.

Talent Development In The Shadows

To summarize, we don’t have a clear understanding on all the factors that impact talent development, whether the effects are positive or negative, how these factors will materialize and the size of the effect. Add in that hindsight provides little help in learning from historical cases and that there is potentially some randomness in the process.

This leads to the conclusion that there is just too little understanding and too much uncertainty about what impacts talent development to claim, with any credibility at least, it is possible to forecast who will go on to reach the top level.

Accepting that we have a lot less control on shaping our own destinies than motivational quotes on belief and effort would have us believe, and being incapable of predicting what will happen, leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction and helplessness. But, despite all I have written so far, there is still a way to make a prediction on an individual’s future.

The amount of players that can reach the top level is limited as it is not about reaching a certain standard but being the best of what there is. For example, taking football where data are available, there are 1.5 million English youth players involved in organized competitions. In the Premier League there are approximately 180 English players.

Each sport will have different ratios with the number of youth participants usually correlating with the number of professional career opportunities. The underlying point is that only a select few can ever make it. So, without needing to know anything about the individual child, it is possible to make the most accurate forecast possible.

Regardless of the child’s current talent and assumed prospects, the chance they reach the highest level is very small.

Benefits of Sport

But this is nothing to be too discouraged about as sport provides many guaranteed benefits that are more significant than the very small prospects of a playing career. It just requires that what is provided reflects this imbalance.

I fear childhood, in some cases, is becoming professionalized and rigorously programmed by adults. Opportunities to experiment and explore different interests are being displaced by structured activities with the focus to maximize future career opportunities. Creative potential and enjoyment is at risk from having to abide by the established path to success.

It is sometimes reflected in how skills training is presented to children who play football. They are given the impression of another compulsory task that must be accomplished rather than an activity to just enjoy and lose yourself in. That approach is misguided in my opinion. Much better and more effective is to excite them about this wonderful activity without any mention of the benefits for their football development. That will naturally occur regardless.

The attraction of a professional career is to extend the enjoyment of playing as a child into adulthood, which, in any case, it will never capture to the full extent. I started out playing as a kid with my friends and later was fortunate enough to play professionally and for my country. My senior career has been hugely fulfilling and lots of fun but, if I could choose only one of those experiences, I would opt for the former in the blink of an eye.

Whilst having a career at the top is challenging and uncertain for any child, much more achievable and rewarding is building a lifelong passion and involvement in the game as players, coaches, referees and other roles. Rather than being reserved for the privileged few, this success is available to the majority as long as that is the foundation for what we provide for children.