7 min
Why we do not run trials at eight
A trial at that age measures who grew first, and every child told they were not good enough was told something untrue.
Put forty eight-year-olds on a pitch for an hour and the ones who stand out will overwhelmingly be the biggest and the fastest. At that age the biggest and fastest are, more often than not, simply the oldest — a child born in January is up to eleven months older than one born in December, which at eight is close to an eighth of a lifetime.
You can see the result in the intake numbers of academies everywhere: roughly three children born in the first half of the year for every one born in the second, and squads that contain no December children at all. That is not a talent distribution. It is a measurement error, repeated annually, and it removes an enormous number of children from the game before anybody has found out whether they would have been any good.
So we do not select before thirteen, we build groups by size as often as by birthday, and our coaches know each child's birth month before the session rather than afterwards. None of that fixes the problem — a football school cannot fix it — but it does mean we are not the ones telling an eight-year-old something untrue about themselves.