Methodological Approaches to Talent Identification in Team Sports: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Talent identification (TID) and talent development (TD) continue to receive significant investment from team sports organisations, highlighting their importance in attempting to identify potential elite athletes. Accompanying this continual pursuit to unearth future talent is an ever-increasing body of research aiming to provide solutions and strategies to optimise TID and TD processes. Therefore, the aim of this review is to provide a summary and critical synthesis of the methodological approaches applied to TID in team sports and present considerations for future TID research. Specifically, this review highlights three key areas for consideration: (1) the timespan of the research design; (2) the use of monodisciplinary or multidisciplinary variables; and (3) the fidelity of the methodological approaches to the assessment of talent. The review highlights the benefits of longitudinal, multidisciplinary, and ecologically valid research designs for TID within team sports.

Predictive Value of Repeated Jump Testing on Nomination Status in Professional and under 19 Soccer Players

“…Our reported AUC is much higher compared to the reported AUC that ranged from 0.65 to 0.79 when general motor performance (i.e., 40 m sprint, agility, CMJ, Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test) and domain-specific motor performance parameters were used as predictors of future U17 players’ status [ 38 ]. The difference in the age groups and the associated maturity levels between the forementioned study and the present study may be the reason we reported higher AUC, since both age and maturity have a significant impact on prediction models [ 15 , 29 , 39 , 88 , 89 ].…”

“…On the other hand, soccer clubs are businesses that want to capitalize on their assets as soon as they can and prolong their players’ career to maximize the potential revenue [ 4 , 11 , 12 , 13 ]. Therefore, soccer clubs have invested in early talent identification programs, as early as 11 to 16 years old, to develop these youth players into elite-professional ones [ 4 , 10 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. Williams and Reilly [ 16 ] have developed the “Potential Predictors of Talent in Soccer”, which incorporates 25 potential predictors in relation to physical, physiological, psychological, and sociological components [ 16 ].…”

“…Multidimensional models present field-based implementation difficulties [ 15 , 38 ]. Given the current uncertainty on which method is best to predict professional success, practitioners need a less extensive, single field-based/monodisciplinary powerful single predictor/method that will classify youth’s soccer potential to a professional status [ 38 ].…”

“…Finding the most powerful single predictor will contribute to identifying relevant characteristics within a group (e.g., professionals vs. non-professionals) and to selecting the most appropriate training stimuli for future performance potential [ 19 , 52 , 53 , 54 ]. Assuming that the proposed paradigm of Williams and Reilly has a hierarchical order [ 16 ], this raises the question of which disciplines and related variables may be worthy of inclusion in a monodimensional modeling that will provide power discriminating values for future performance levels [ 15 ].…”

Strategy in talent systems: Top-down and bottom-up approaches

“…This has significant implications for both practice and research. Research has long acknowledged the range of complex biopsychosocial factors that influence TD (Abbott and Collins, 2004 ), mostly ending the reductionistic search for single variables causative of elite performance (Barraclough et al, 2022 ). We suggest that research at the system level should follow, recognizing the inherent complexity, perhaps utilizing mixed methods at multiple levels of analysis (Headley and Plano Clark, 2020 ).…”