Relative age and birthplace effect in Japanese professional sports: a quantitative evaluation using a Bayesian hierarchical Poisson model

Abstract

Relative age effect (RAE) in sports has been well documented. Recent studies investigate the effect of birthplace in addition to the RAE. The first objective of this study was to show the magnitude of the RAE in two major professional sports in Japan, baseball and soccer. Second, we examined the birthplace effect and compared its magnitude with that of the RAE. The effect sizes were estimated using a Bayesian hierarchical Poisson model with the number of players as dependent variable. The RAEs were 9.0% and 7.7% per month for soccer and baseball, respectively. These estimates imply that children born in the first month of a school year have about three times greater chance of becoming a professional player than those born in the last month of the year. Over half of the difference in likelihoods of becoming a professional player between birthplaces was accounted for by weather conditions, with the likelihood decreasing by 1% per snow day. An effect of population size was not detected in the data. By investigating different samples, we demonstrated that using quarterly data leads to underestimation and that the age range of sampled athletes should be set carefully.