Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to check the eventual existence of any Relative Age Effect (RAE) in the recent 2013’ FIFA Male Under-17 (U-17) World Cup Football tournament. The data pertaining to the players who participated in to that event were collected from the FIFA website. They included the players’ dates of birth (day, month and year) and position (goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or striker).The distributions of birth months were significantly different with more players born in the early months of the year compared with the later months. For the entire cohort of players, 38.7% were born in the first quarter of the year while only 10.5% were born in the last 3 months in the same year. This relative age effect held for all FIFA-designated teams except for the Nigeria and the Côte d'Ivoire having shown a reverse relative age effect. The results of this investigation show that at the highest level of youth soccer, the RAE still exists and is a strong bias toward inclusion of players born early in the concerned year.
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