this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Football / Soccer / Calcio / Futebol / Fußball
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Up until a certain age it really doesn’t matter if the boys and girls are playing together, so this is a good thing to do. She’s talented enough if they decided this so this will be good for her development. A lot of people have played in teams with girls when they were young kids, who cares.
I call BS here; go read the first chapter of the book Outliers. Early years, physical development matters a LOT. Studies showed pro-athelete's birthdays are biased heavily towards the beginning of the year. The idea being that at age 4.75 say you have an extra .75 years of physical development over peers born later in the year. This manifests in you seeing more of the play as you'll be physically dominant. This compounds into more practice, eventually leading to being better (on average), so playing more, so getting better, so getting picked for development teams, so getting better and on & on.
Something else the book argues is that opportunities were very important, and you can also think that it was the opportunities given to those who had more physical development at the earliest stage increased their likelihood to make it. This is sort of like her getting selected for the special team outside the odds.
I would argue that it is mostly about amount of ball involvement while playing. A kid born earlier in the year will on average be physically stronger and therefore have the ball more and therefore develop skills faster, even if players born later in the year plays an equal amount. When the player born later catches up physical the early born players will have better football specific skills which is hard to catch up on.