The Best 9-Year-Old Rarely Becomes the Best 18-Year-Old

I've seen it before. A kid gets crowned "the best" on his U11 team — and by the time he's finishing his youth career and heading toward college, he's not close to the best anymore.

This isn't an accident, and it isn't really a mystery either. There's a real reason it keeps happening, and it starts with what we're actually measuring when we call a nine-year-old "the best."

Why This Happens

Part of it is on us as coaches. We want to win games right now — at nine, ten, eleven, twelve — which is not actually what those ages are for. And when winning is the goal, "best" quietly starts meaning "biggest, strongest, fastest." The kid who's grown early. The kid who can just outrun and outmuscle everyone on the field.

This isn't just a thought — there's real research behind it. It's called the Relative Age Effect, and it's been studied across youth soccer for a while by people a lot smarter than me. Kids born earlier in the selection year are disproportionately represented on elite youth teams — in some studies, up to 75% of players on a roster were born in the first half of the year. Not because they're better players. Because they're older, bigger, and further along physically than a teammate born eleven months later who's technically the same "age group."

Especially in the U.S., we lean hard into this bias. We associate "best" with size and speed more than most soccer cultures do. And it costs us. Research also shows that once the early bloomers stop being bigger than everyone else — once their late-blooming peers catch up physically in their mid-teens — a lot of those early standouts don't have the technical or tactical foundation to keep up. They were never actually taught to play. They were just bigger.

Pedri Wouldn't Have Made a Lot of Teams

I think about Pedri a lot when this topic comes up. Probably because I’m a huge FC Barcelona fan.

Growing up in the Canary Islands, scouts from the local big club, CD Tenerife, passed on him — considered him too small and skinny. Real Madrid gave him a trial later and passed too. He wasn't the athletic standout. He didn't look like "the best player" by the metrics a lot of programs still use today.

He's now one of the best midfielders in the world.

If Pedri were coming up in a lot of American youth environments at nine or ten years old, I'd bet a lot of coaches wouldn't have picked him for their team. Not because he wasn't good. Because he wasn't big.

What I Look For

I'm not saying this is the only right way to do it. But personally, I've always told my players that the two most important tools they have are their brain and their feet.

The brain piece is multifaceted. It's not just "smart." It's a sequence: you have to scan first. Then you have to perceive what you saw. Then you have to assess it — what does this actually mean, what are my options. And only then can you act. Most players who look like they have "bad decision-making" actually just broke down somewhere earlier in that chain — they never scanned, so there was nothing to perceive, so there was nothing to assess.

The feet piece is technique. First touch. Passing ability. That has to be sharp before we even start looking at anything else. Not after athleticism. Before it.

Size and speed are real advantages. I'm not pretending they're not. But they're not development. They're a temporary head start that a lot of other players will eventually catch up to — and when that catch-up happens, the only players still standing out are the ones who were taught to actually play the game underneath the physical gifts.

What This Means for You

If you're a coach: resist the urge to build your team, your lineup, your praise around who's biggest and fastest right now. That's not "the best player." That's the player furthest along in puberty this particular season. Coach the brain and the feet. That's what lasts.

If you're a parent: your kid not being the most dominant athlete on the field at ten means almost nothing about where they'll be at eighteen. Some of the best players in the world were told they were too small. Don't let a September birthday or a late growth spurt convince you or your kid that they're behind. They might just be getting started.

If you’re a player: keep showing up regardless of what side of this coin you’re on. The game will always give back what you put in. Never compare yourself to others and try to let your work and feet do the talking for you.

That's it for this week. See you next Monday.

— Coach Frim

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