Athletes born early within an annual youth age-group selection year are probably more likely to be selected for sports teams and talent development programs than those bom later in that year. Overrepresentation of these relatively older athletes in youth and adult sport is known as thc relative age effect (RAE; for reviews, see Cobley, Baker, Warte, &r McKenna, 2009; Musch & Grondin, 2001; Wattie, Cobley, & Baker, 2008). The RAE has been shown to occur in several sports and is evident in youth (e.g., Heben, Van Winckel,& Williams, 2005) and professional sport (e.g., Baker & Logan, 2007). In professional sport, relative age effects were found in samples of 528 male soccer players participating in the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 1990 World Cup (Barnsley, Thompson, & Legault, 1992), 1,013 male ice hockey players in the National Hockey League (NHL; Baker & Logan, 2007), 837 male baseball players in Major League Baseball (MLB;Thompson, Barnsley,&Stabelsky, 1991), and an undisclosed number of male football players in the Australian Football League (AFL) during the 2004 season (Abernethy & Farrow, 2005). RAEs were found in these popular team sports, probably because the number of youth participants usually exceeds the number of available places, and "talented" athletes are identified, selected, and developed from a young age (Cobley et al., 2009; Wattie et al, 2008). Researchers recently provided evidence that within these team sports there are certain contexts in which the RAE, is not found where one might expect to find it. Relatively younger athletes have been shown to be more likely to receive higher salaries in German professional soccer (Ashworth & Heyndels, 2007) and be chosen in the earlier rounds of NHL drafts (Baker & Logan, 2007) compared to their relatively older counterparts. Higher salaries and selection in the earlier draft rounds are indicators of athletes being more skilled in their sport than those who receive lower salaries or are later picks. Therefore, one might expect to find no RAE or even an overrepresentation of relativeiy younger athletes in a sample of the most skilled athletes. To test this expectation, we examined whether the birth dates of male athletes who had been awarded the most valuable player (or a similar award that indicates being the most skilled) within their professional team sports demonstrated the RAE. This effect was previously shown in samples from each of the four male professional team sport contexts (e.g., Baker & Logan, 2007). However, we hypothesized that birth dates for these award-winning athletes would demonstrate a bias toward relatively younger athletes (e.g., Ashworth & Heyndels, 2007) when compared to the average birth distribution of the general population from which this sample was drawn.
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