Defying the odds: the relative age effect's absence among the best teenage football players in the world

Abstract The relative age effect (RAE) is the advantage of being born earlier than others in the selection period, being more experienced and more developed. It has been suggested that, among the best athletes, the RAE might inverse due to relatively younger players struggling more and thus developing different, more robust, skill sets. Recently, the CIES Football Observatory selected the world’s 200 best teenage football players, using objective measures such as minutes played - weighted by sporting level, transfer value, and an in-game performance index. That sample of players enabled testing whether they are truly different from top performers in youth competitions, and whether the RAE might even inverse at the top level. To that end, in a natural experiment, birth date distributions across quartiles of the 200 CIES’s list players were compared with the corresponding distributions of players participating in the most recent FIFA U-20 World Cups, in Chile in 2025 ( N = 504) and in Argentina in 2023 ( N = 504). The birth date distributions, between the CIES’ 200 and the 2025 FIFA U20WC, significantly differed from each other, χ 2 (3, N = 704) = 34.3336, p < .00001, as did distributions between the CIES’ 200 and players in the 2023 FIFA U20WC, χ 2 (3, N = 704) = 19.3969, p < .0003. The latter two samples were similar. The results indicate that while the RAE is advantageous for those at the highest level of youth football, it has not helped those who have developed into world-class senior players.