Someone may have already done this, but just responding to a post in the N&A forum: Here's a look at the age distributions of 185 players across the U15, U17, U18, and U20 player pools: Jan 37 Feb 20 Mar 18 Apr 20 May 20 June 9 Jul 5 Aug 13 Sep 18 Oct 10 Nov 8 Dec 7 Now, with 185 players, you'd normally expect to see about 1 player for every 2 days in the month (e.g. 14 in Feb, 15 or 16 in Jan). But, for whatever reasons, births are even distributed (no need to discuss here) and some months have more births than others (e.g. http://www.panix.com/~murphy/bday.html). So, you would expect those months to have more players in the mix than most. But, that's not what the data shows at all. What time of year are the age group cutoffs?
As the data might lead you to believe.....it's January. The distribution isn't great, but to be honest, it's not as bad as it used to be. (IIRC) I'd also like to note that many of the early birthdays among the U-20s are 1992s -- which isn't as bad because they are all at least a year younger than the limit. In fairness, that might just be a remnant of the Age Effect of the last U-17 cycle, but it's not quite the same as having a ton of January 1991 people.
this topic comes up a lot in this forum: https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=875966 https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1209415 Unfortunately, nothing's going to change. You can switch things like cutoff dates and there still will be kids close to the altered cutoff date less developed. If you initiate things like quotas there's still a chance guys who didn't make the quota for their age but are better than those younger on the team that are left off. It's very, very hard to gauge how good a kid is going to in say, 6 months, and then compare him to the developed kid training in front of you unless the younger kid is a phenom. In an ideal world you would have very small age groups or cycles, such as one for each year or 6 months, but this would cost an enormous amount of money. Overall though, it's impossible to completely get rid of the bias.
Well... not a surprise, and I don't know what you can really do about this without causing an upheaval throughout the system. Even if the USSF could do something for its feeder programs, it's not clear how much of this effect is created outside of the age groupings youth soccer leagues. I did think it was interesting, though.