Opinions: Talent development becomes talent disposal

VG’s sparkling article series on inequality in Oslo football engages many. But what are the underlying mechanisms behind the inequality?

Based on our research and that of others, we will point to three related factors that drive the class differences in football.

Firstly: Do we sort talent on the basis of children or adults? If you coach a team that wins a children’s tournament, you have probably done everything wrong, because you usually have to top the team to win.

Youth coaches with ambitions have to show something to move up in the coaching hierarchy. Results are measurable, and thus something to beat on the table with.

When Sweden won the U21 European Championship in 2015, the Swedish sports researcher Tomas Peterson said it was the worst that could happen. You were led to believe that you had done everything right, when in fact you had done most of it wrong. The triumph set talent development back 50 years, he claimed.

Talent identification at a young age has little to do with it. Groups of friends are broken up, teams wither, and the children’s enjoyment of sports is replaced by stress and pressure.

Peterson suggests removing all U national teams. At best they are only expenditure items, at worst they are counterproductive.

Almost all children in Norway participate in organized sports. About one per thousand of them reach peak levels. Why should sport be run in a way that facilitates this alcohol percentage, at the expense of the other 99.9 percent?

In many ways, sport has a paradoxical goal structure. It should be inclusive and bridge-building, but at the same time it is essentially based on competition and ranking, which seems exclusionary.

Much of the debate about children’s sports regulations and topping is therefore about when the transition to a more “exclusive” sport should take place.

The research shows that even among teenagers it is impossible to predict who will be the best. The relative age effect shows that the chance of reaching top level depends on the time of year one is born.

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On average, there are significant differences in maturation between a ten-year-old born in January and one born in December. In football, children and young people born early in the year are heavily overrepresented in the younger national teams.

Such a sorting logic will lead to both the “talents” (those who are the most mature, have read more books or played more football than the others) and those who form the rear when the sorting takes place, to be challenged at their level. .

The problem is that the advantage of the “talented” in that case increases in line with the adaptations.

Picking talent early thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Those who were selected may have been the best, but they were because they were bet on, not because they had the greatest potential in the first place.

Early selection is therefore a waste of talent. You only bet on those who are selected. This leads to dropouts among those who are not selected. And those who are not selected are often from the places with the worst facilities, such as the eastern edge of Oslo.

Secondly: Football is professionalizing and becoming more “serious”. It is played all year round on heated pitches. The trainers are trained and paid.

There is a market for this which increases costs and thus inequality. Private players are emerging who organize motivated and well-off children and young people’s training.

The talent hunt is taking hold increasingly further down the age groups. The elite clubs receive education compensation if they bring in talent from the local area early.

In the worst case, this rewards work that many researchers believe is counterproductive.

Third: Dropout is clearly linked to social inequality and happens silently. At a parents’ meeting where the majority have generous finances, it is quickly agreed to indulge in both paid coaches and a training camp in Barcelona.

Questioning this can be stigmatizing. The apostasy happens as a silent farewell.

Such systematic dropouts also affect the composition of the remaining group. On average, it becomes increasingly resourceful as the less resourceful leave.

At the next crossroads, they agree on measures that increase costs further. The process is self-reinforcing: those remaining become an ever smaller and more homogeneous group.

In this way, the limit for what is perceived as reasonable spending is gradually being shifted.

Football has become like cross-country skiing. The forest’s toilers dominated until the 1960s. Today, many people come from west Oslo or from the middle-class district of Byåsen in Trondheim. We see the same east-west shift in football.

The grass is greener in Oslo West because professionalization has progressed further.

It is not surprising that west-side youth are overrepresented in all places where selection takes place: They can train more, on better tracks, with (at least on paper) better follow-up. The overall gap becomes significant.

Since we cannot know who has the potential to succeed, we should take care of all motivated ones as long as possible. Parts of professionalization run counter to such an ambition.

It has a social cost, but also a sporting one.

The question is whether Norwegian sports can afford it.