Biobanding: Example of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain shows how to solve age-old problem of football’s late developers

When he was a youth coach at Southampton, James Bunce remembers a skinny 13-year-old. “He was clearly lacking in maturity. His voice hadn’t broken. He wasn’t as big and muscular as the others.”

Southampton decided to move the boy down a year, so that he would be able to get on the ball more and develop his technical skills. “He thrived, he got challenged, he was coached, he was mentored. Three years later he was in the team as a 16-year-old.”

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s journey was the “light bulb moment” in showing Bunce how young players develop physically at different rates – and need to be treated as unique, rather than lumped in with the rest of their year.

There was no science behind the decision to move Oxlade-Chamberlain down a year – only intuition. But Bunce believed that a rigorous scientific approach could improve youth development. After he moved to the Premier League in 2014, Bunce introduced the inaugural biobanding tournament – grouping players together based on physical maturity, rather than age. Last year, he was recruited by the US Soccer Federation and has since launched biobanding for young boys and girls.

Calendar advantage

In education, a child’s date of birth is one of the biggest roadblocks to them thriving: those born at the start of the school year have 30 per cent more chance of attending Oxford or Cambridge than those born at the end of the school year. This phenomenon – the relative age effect – is as prevalent in sport.

Seventy per cent of players in Premier League academies are born in the first six months of the school year, and just 30 per cent in the last six months. A Big Six Premier League side recently analysed how long their academy players stayed before being released. Players born from September-November stayed for an average of four years before being released. Those born from June-August only stayed for a solitary year.

Biobanding is an attempt to change this. It groups players together based on their physical ages, as determined by the Khamis-Roche method, which takes into account height, weight and maturity. This allows late physical developers – like Oxlade-Chamberlain, who was born in August – a fair chance to develop, without being penalised for developing later.

As important, Bunce says, is that biobanding can help early developers. While 70 per cent of Premier League academy players are born in the first six months of the school year, only half of Premier League first team players are – so the return on investment on academy players old for their year is less. Counterintuitively, a higher share of the very best athletes are born later in their selection years; those who have overcome multifarious obstacles develop a resilience that stands them apart at professional level.

This suggests that normal age group football lets down the fastest physical developers – but in a very different way to later developers. The greater strength and power of early developers is a transient advantage. “That player needs to be pushed up a year so they need to use their skills and tactics rather than just running with the ball past people,” Bunce says.

The All Blacks are testament to the benefits of a more enlightened approach: they have long grouped underage players by weight, rather than age.

Changing the school year culture

Yet the biobanding that is increasingly pervasive in Premier League academies needs to be accompanied by wider cultural change, believes Nick Levett, former talent identification manager for the Football Association who now works for UK Coaching.

Grouping players by age in schools limits the prospects of players who physically mature later even being recognised by club academies.

“Professional clubs are picking from a biased sample. I’m not surprised there’s a bias in the professional game,” Levett says. “Certainly at grassroots level I don’t think anything’s really been addressed.”

Belgium have been successful in allowing players to either move up or down a year, depending on their physical development, benefiting late developers including Kevin De Bruyne and Thibaut Courtois. Levett advocates the UK emulating this at grassroots level.

A particularly significant change, Levett believes, would be for youth football to be organised on the basis of age, not school year. This would mean that all children experience being both the youngest and oldest player in a team, while their development could be accelerated by playing with a wider array of teammates.

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Yet whatever is done to curb the relative age effect, “there’s always a tradeoff,” Levett says. He believes that no one indicator alone should determine which sort of team a young player is put into. “Clubs need to consider the whole person.”

The challenge is arduous, and biobanding is part of a solution rather than a panacea. But the prize – unlocking talent from late developers, while accelerating the growth of early developers – is profound. “You’re able to create an environment specific to the demands of that one athlete,” Bunce reflects. “Since the inception of biobanding people are finding there is a scientific answer. There is a way we can alleviate this problem.”

@timwig