Graeme: …and how they felt?


Michael: Yeah they never said anything. I just knew they were happy.


Graeme: Just thinking, mostly for you but even for me in terms of some of the offers, some of the conversations they’ve had, we didn’t know they’d had those conversations at that time.


Graeme: They didn’t want the decisions we made to be influenced by money…They wanted us to choose what worked for us.


Michael: And for some parents they might look at that and think, ‘You’re mad!’ Do you know what I mean? Think you should have told the lad exactly what was on offer. But for us it worked better that way.


Graeme: And for me, not going on to have a career I still wouldn’t change, pretty comfortable with the decision I made.


w Family Planning


Players born earliest in the year group are more likely to be selected for sports teams and talent development programmes than those born late in the year group. So, in the UK it’s the early developing autumn babies, from September onwards, that gain the upper hand. This overrepresentation of relatively older players is found in all youth sports in all countries and most senior sports too.


This phenomenon has become widely known as the relative age or birth bias effect. These relatively older athletes gain early performance advantages due to their increased body size, height, strength, power, and relatively greater experience. As ‘talented’ athletes are identified, selected, and developed from a young age this overrepresentation of athletes born earlier within the annual selection period also continues into professional sport. This means that in general a large portion of the talent pool is potentially being missed due to an arbitrary selection cut-off.


However, recent research has revealed that relatively younger athletes, like Michael (July 28th birthday)


and Lionel Messi (June 24th) are more likely to receive a higher salary and command higher transfer fees in the long term.


To survive in the system relatively younger athletes must develop skill-based advantages (other than size, height, strength etc.) such as agility, technique, and decision-making. Johann Cruyff, who made his reputation as a coach at Barcelona by promoting smaller more technical players including Pep Guardiola, makes exactly this point:


“Everybody in Spain thought if you were small or thin, you couldn’t play. And we said, ‘Hey, that’s not true, when you’re small or thin you’ve got to develop a lot of things which a big one never can develop.’”


A recent study supporting this view showed that late maturing boys at age 14 (biological age was assessed by skeletal x-ray) had greater success by age 22 in becoming professional players than their early maturing counterparts.


20


Michael: I know there’s been many a young player that’s gone through and signed a nice lucrative contract at 15, a nice 4 year contract, couple of years pro…and haven’t got anywhere near the first team and really, in the grand scheme of things, is it worth it you know? I think you’ve really got to judge where you’re happiest, before you start thinking about money.


Graeme: And some are just like auctions. I remember one lad ended up going to Arsenal on a big contract, everyone wanted him, at that time he was special, at that 15 age. He ended up going to Arsenal, for something like…


Michael: that’s another thing isn’t it, you get too much too soon. If you don’t have the right support, just letting you go down the wrong road, it’s a slippery slope you know.


You’ve really got to judge where you’re happiest, before thinking about money


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