Survival Versus Attraction Advantages and Talent Selection in Sport

Excited to share this new article in Sports Medicine - Open. In this paper, we use evolutionary approaches related to ‘survival’ and ‘attraction’ to discuss potential limitations in research on talent ID in sport. The inflexibility of many talent development systems results in researchers and stakeholders being unable to determine whether athletes emerge at the end of the pathway because they are the best performers (i.e., the best survivors of the system due to their performance) or because they are most attractive to gatekeepers who make selections. Although these two factors are obviously related (better performers should be more 'attractive' to coaches, scouts, and recruiters), they aren’t synonymous. Importantly, current designs/approaches in talent research are incapable of distinguishing ‘why’ someone succeeds. This lack of understanding might be related to the low predictive accuracy of athlete/talent selection in most sports.