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"What's his birthday?"
That was the only question a stranger asked Stephen Lawrence while his young son was playing at a session in north London. Stephen told him: 20 August. The reply has stayed with him for more than two decades.
"That's a shame. He'll never play professional football."
That boy, James Lawrence, went on to play for Ajax's youth sides, Anderlecht, St. Pauli and Nürnberg, and to win caps for Wales. Stephen went on to spend 20-plus years researching why that stranger's assumption is so common - and so costly. When he joined us on Project Footballer, he gave one of the clearest explanations of the relative age effect I've heard, and the most useful advice for parents of children born late in the school year.
What the relative age effect actually is
In England, youth football age groups follow the school year, with a cut-off of 1 September. A child born on 1 September and a child born on 31 August play in the same age group, despite being almost a full year apart.
At seven or eight, a year is a big slice of a child's life. Older children in the year are often bigger, quicker and more coordinated, simply because they've had more time to grow. They stand out in matches, they get picked, they get scouted - and once they're inside an academy they get better coaching, better facilities and better opposition. The head start compounds.
The cut-off date itself isn't magic. As Stephen pointed out, much of Europe runs its competition year from 1 January, and the bias simply shifts: the over-represented players there are born in January and February.
How big the gap is
Stephen's own experience at Ajax gave him a striking example. Across the club's under-18 and under-19 groups at the time, he recalls roughly 50 players - and only three of them born in the second half of the year.
His wider point is that high-level academies regularly end up with as many as 80% of players born in the first half of the selection year. Flip the cut-off date and the same thing happens to a completely different group of children. As he put it, "it's not rocket science" to conclude that talent is being missed.
The effect doesn't stop at football. Stephen pointed to research showing children born at the start of the school year tend to do better academically, all the way through to university. In other words, children born late in the year face "obstacles all the way" - in the classroom and on the pitch.
And it lasts longer than most people assume. When Stephen raised it with a senior academy figure years ago, he was told the effect is "gone by 13". His research suggests it can persist into players' mid-to-late twenties.
Why clubs keep doing it
If the bias is this well known, why does it persist? Stephen's answer is refreshingly blunt: results.
"If you have a team of entirely relatively young players, you're going to lose all your matches. And everyone's going to say, well, you're a useless coach."
Clubs know about it. From my own time scouting, I can tell you that the registers we're handed at talent days include each child's birth month, and recruitment teams share data with scouts showing how skewed the intake still is. Awareness is there. What's missing is a system that rewards clubs for acting on it - and as Stephen says, no single club wants to be the one losing every Saturday while its rivals carry on as normal.
What Stephen would change
His preferred fix is an average team age rule. Instead of a hard cut-off, a team must have an average age at or below a set figure - say 13 for an under-13 competition - which allows a mix of slightly older and younger players.
The clever part is what it does to selection. Under an average age rule, a talented younger player becomes extremely valuable to a coach, because they bring the team's average down and create room elsewhere in the squad. It changes how coaches and scouts look at players, and in Stephen's words, it's a system "in which the cream would naturally rise to the top".
He has tested the idea. A two-year project with Stoke City, run before the pandemic, used mixed-age teams with matched average ages. Questionnaires afterwards were, he says, "overwhelmingly positive": younger players enjoyed playing alongside players they looked up to, and older players enjoyed helping them.
It's also how children have always organised football for themselves. Pick-up games mix ages naturally, and the two captains pick evenly because a 20-0 game is no fun for anyone. I've read a lot of footballers' autobiographies looking for patterns in how they made it, and mixed-age football in parks, cages and on holiday sites comes up again and again.
My take
There's a fair challenge to all this, and we put it to Stephen in the episode: children born early in the year often arrive more confident - at school and in sport - and confidence matters. Maybe some of the early-born players really are the better long-term prospects.
But the numbers Stephen shared are too lopsided to be explained by confidence alone. If the same pattern flips whenever you move the cut-off date, the date is doing a lot of the selecting. That's a problem for clubs leaving talent on the table, and it's a much bigger problem for the children who drift out of the game believing they weren't good enough.
In our own talent identification at We Make Footballers, we lean on one-v-one and two-v-two formats with children matched against opponents of a similar physical size. It doesn't remove the bias - nothing does - but it gives smaller and younger players a fairer chance to show what they can do with the ball.
If your child is born late in the school year
Stephen's advice to parents was simple, and I'd echo every word of it.
Take the long view. "Be patient. You've got to take a long view." James was released by Arsenal after two years in their academy, had a single season at QPR, spent years in grassroots football, and still built a professional career. Development is not a straight line, and very little is decided at nine.
Don't hand your child the burden. Stephen never discussed the relative age effect with his son while he was growing up. "You can't let a child carry a burden around thinking they're not good enough for a reason which is outside their control." Knowing about it is useful for you as a parent - it helps you keep opportunities open - but it isn't useful for them.
Keep the opportunities coming. More teams, more games, more chances to play at a level where they get on the ball. Stephen's broader view is that young children need "a multiplicity of opportunity", not an early funnel.
See playing down an age group as a positive. Being asked to play with a younger age group can feel like a demotion. Often it's the opposite: a chance to play with genuine peers, get on the ball more and build confidence. I know of a number of players who spent long periods playing down and went on to have professional careers.
Stand back. "It's their lives, it's not your life." Get them there on time, make sure it's fun, be there when they're injured or disappointed - and leave the coaching to the coaches.
The relative age effect is real, it's well documented and it isn't going away on its own. But it is a bias, not a verdict. A birthday in August didn't stop James Lawrence. Patience, plenty of opportunity and parents who kept the pressure off made a real difference.
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