Mapping passage, permanence, and transition hotspots in elite football development pathways

This study proposed and applied a pathway-based spatial approach to elite football development by distinguishing three complementary hotspot functions: passage, permanence, and transition. Using a retrospective cohort of 154 players who made their senior debut for Athletic Club, we reconstructed player-age location histories over the developmental period from ages 10 to 22 and analysed 1889 player-age observations. A transition was defined as a change in recorded location between consecutive ages. Descriptive, inferential, survival-style, and network analyses were used to examine player movement, pathway stabilisation, and location-level hotspot structure. The cohort recorded 331 location transitions; players passed through a median of three entities and made a median of two transitions. Transitions were unequally distributed across age intervals, χ 2 (11) = 47.60, p < .001, with the highest transition probabilities observed at ages 21 (33.8%) and 20 (27.9%). Location 1 dominated the network, accounting for 77.3% of players, 43.8% of player-years, and 29.3% of throughflow activity. However, after excluding Location 1, ten robust hotspots remained, led by Location 2, Location 3, Location 4, and Location 5. Half of the cohort had stabilised in their final entity by age 19, while 33.8% remained mobile at age 21. These findings show that elite football formation can be examined not only through where players are born or selected, but also through the locations where they pass, remain, and move during development.