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beginning, his advantage isn’t so much that he is inherently better but only that he is a little older. But by the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt, he really
is
better, so he’s the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues. *
    Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.
    In the United States, football and basketball don’t select, stream, and differentiate quite as dramatically. As a result, a child can be a bit behind physically in those sports and still play as much as his or her more mature peers. * But baseball does. The cutoff date for almost all nonschool baseball leagues in the United States is July 31, with the result that more major league players are born in August than in any other month. (The numbers are striking: in 2005, among Americans playing major league baseball 505 were born in August versus 313 born in July.)
    European soccer, similarly, is organized like hockey and baseball—and the birth-date distributions in that sport are heavily skewed as well. In England, the eligibility date is September 1, and in the football association’s premier league at one point in the 1990s, there were 288 players born between September and November and only 136 players born between June and August. In international soccer, the cutoff date used to be August 1, and in one recent junior world championship tournament, 135 players were born in the three months after August 1, and just 22 were born in May, June, and July. Today the cutoff date for international junior soccer is January 1. Take a look at the roster of the 2007 Czechoslovakian National Junior soccer team, which made the Junior World Cup finals.
    Here we go again:
No.
Player
Birth Date
Position
1
Marcel Gecov
Jan. 1, 1988
MF
2
Ludek Frydrych
Jan. 3, 1987
GK
3
Petr Janda
Jan. 5, 1987
MF
4
Jakub Dohnalek
Jan. 12, 1988
DF
5
Jakub Mares
Jan. 26, 1987
MF
6
Michal Held
Jan. 27, 1987
DF
7
Marek Strestik
Feb. 1, 1987
FW
8
Jiri Valenta
Feb. 14, 1988
MF
9
Jan Simunek
Feb. 20, 1987
DF
10
Tomas Oklestek  
Feb. 21, 1987
MF
11
Lubos Kalouda
Feb. 21, 1987
MF
12
Radek Petr
Feb. 24, 1987
GK
13
Ondrej Mazuch
Mar. 15, 1989  
DF
14
Ondrej Kudela
Mar. 26, 1987
MF
15
Marek Suchy
Mar. 29, 1988
DF
16
Martin Fenin
Apr. 16, 1987
FW
17
Tomas Pekhart
May 26, 1989
FW
18
Lukas Kuban
Jun. 22, 1987
DF
19
Tomas Cihlar
Jun. 24, 1987
DF
20
Tomas Frystak
Aug. 18, 1987
GK
21
Tomas Micola
Sep. 26, 1988
MF
    At the national team tryouts, the Czech soccer coaches might as well have told everyone born after midsummer that they should pack their bags and go home.
    Hockey and soccer are just games, of course, involving a select few. But these exact same biases also show up in areas of much more consequence, like education. Parents with a child born at the end of the calendar year often think about holding their child back before the start of kindergarten: it’s hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many months earlier. But most parents, one suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away.
But it doesn’t
. It’s just like hockey. The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.
    Recently, two economists—Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey—looked at the