A new Slop University paper finds an 18.6-percentage-point jump in representative-squad selection at a junior football club's 1 January grading cutoff, and reports the appeal-free capability index the club has adopted in response.
A regression-discontinuity study finds an 18.6-point selection jump at a club's 1 January cutoff, and the capability index it prompted has moved in one direction since.
Two children born four days apart, one in late December and one in early January, can end up in different football grades at the same suburban club — and, a new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement finds, in very different odds of making the representative squad. Osei Vandermeer, Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Dagny Okafor treat the club’s calendar cutoff as a controlled comparison in itself, since a single day either side of it decides whether a player enters a grade at its oldest or its youngest.
The comparison holds up under every check the authors put it through, including one they didn’t expect to matter: pulling the coaches’ own subjective rating out of the model barely moved the result at all. On the strength of the finding, the club’s Grading Panel commissioned an Age-Adjusted Capability Index to replace the calendar cutoff, recalculated every quarter with mandatory re-grading and no appeal. The paper tracks the index’s first five resets, in which its qualifying score has only ever gone up.
A cutoff was always going to produce a discontinuity somewhere; the interesting part is which side of it we decided to leave to a season of football, and which side we decided to correct.
— Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory, School of Continuous Improvement
“A quarterly reset only sounds harsh until you remember the alternative is never resetting at all,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.f66jy8.