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Research has shown that footballers have become taller over the past six seasons. They’re quicker, too. Several studies have estimated that players rarely broke the 30-kilometre-per-hour barrier in the 1970s and ’80s. According to FIFA stats, 35 players ran at speeds over 35km/h (21.7mph) during the 2026 World Cup.
“There are very few talented six-year-olds out there in soccer that most Premier League clubs will not be aware of, due to their broad scouting systems,” Cumming points out. And it’s not just the Premier League — Yamal was six when he was scouted by Barcelona while playing for his local team nearby. But how early is it really possible to spot talent?
“It’s very difficult,” says Cumming. “Most academies would say that you really can’t identify talent at five or six, apart from the occasional screaming talent, but even that’s a big ask. We have that whole period of puberty where children transform significantly, and you don’t know what’s going to come out at the end. For example, will the athlete have those physical qualities that are going to be necessary for success at the top level?”
While talent identification is tricky at such a young age, talent development is simpler — at least for those with the right resources. Youth sport has become increasingly professionalised over the past decade or so.
Academy athletes are undergoing systematic physical training they previously would not have been exposed to until much later. These days, being a teenager in professional sport means access to formal strength-and-conditioning regimens and elite skills coaches, usually outside the training they do with their team.
“It’s quite common now for a kid to play for their team, then come home and go to a third-party facility to get more skills training,” says Eisenmann. “And maybe to have their own strength-and-conditioning coach as well. That’s all happening from the age of 10 or 11. Younger athletes are getting better and more systematic training at an early age.”
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Cumming was approached by English football’s Premier League in 2015 to help club academies determine “biological ages” (as opposed to their youngsters’ actual ages), enabling them to group players together based on a percentage of their predicted adult stature. It also means they know how much more growing there is to come.
Cumming gives an example from tennis, where he studied the first- and second-ranked players in the country at under-13s level. The top seed was 6ft 2in (188cm), very physical and very dominant, and had already gone through puberty. “We could tell from the assessments he maybe had one year of growth left. He was going to be tall, but was probably successful at 13 because he was almost fully grown.”
The other player was an inch shorter, but showed signs of being a late developer. “We knew straight away that this kid had about five or six years’ worth of growth left in them. They hadn’t gone through puberty. They were also No 2 in the country — so technically, tactically, physically, pretty darn good.” Cumming and his team predicted the player would end up 6ft 8in (203cm) when fully grown, and that’s precisely what happened. And he went on to be more successful than the other athlete in the long term.
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In childhood, we grow at a steady rate of four to five centimetres per year, but when we reach 85 per cent of our adult height, there’s an acceleration, termed the growth spurt. It’s no longer steady growth, but saltatory, meaning there are periods of rapid growth followed by periods of stasis while the rest of the body adapts and catches up.
From age nine in the academies, children are measured every three to four months. During a growth spurt, some football clubs will move to measuring every six weeks, and Cumming said it’s not impossible to see anywhere near 20cm worth of growth per year at the point when the growth spurt is most rapid. For young athletes, the growth spurt can be — but isn’t always — disruptive, leading to adolescent awkwardness and associated dips in performance, plus growth-related injuries, such as Osgood-Schlatter disease (a common cause of knee pain) and pars fractures (a stress fracture in the small bridge of bone that connects consecutive vertebrae in your spine).
In the past, a disruptive growth spurt could have led to an athlete falling out of favour, or, in the case of former Real Madrid player and Wales international Gareth Bale, almost being let go from Southampton’s academy. Now, clubs have the tools to identify when players are in their growth spurt and adapt their training accordingly. “We refer to it as ‘Growers club’,” says Cumming.
Welcome to the age of the sporting superkidhttps://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7452652/2026/07/25/lamine-yamal-sporting-prodigies/
