Compromising Talent: Issues in Identifying and Selecting Talent in Sport

TLDR

The past few decades have seen significant changes in sport delivery and athlete development trends, yet the notion of talent remains central to most athlete development models. This brief review seeks to highlight concerns with the concept of talent and its conceptualization within high‑performance sport systems. It identifies key issues—including the assumption of talent as a fixed capacity, the influence of talent beliefs on development, varying risks in selection decisions, biases in selection approaches, inadequate statistical methods, the unreliability of current performance for predicting future outcomes, and the impact of short‑term priorities and inter‑sport competition—thereby undermining overall development efficiency. These concerns provide a foundation for focused discussions on future research directions in the field.

Abstract

The past few decades have seen a significant change in the delivery of sport and in trends related to athlete development. However, the notion of talent continues to play a critical role in most athlete development models. In this brief review, we highlight concerns with the notion of talent and how it is conceptualized in high performance sport systems. These include: the assumption that talent is a fixed capacity that can be identified early, the influence of talent beliefs on athlete development, the different levels of risk for talent selection decisions, biases evident in approaches to athlete selection, the inadequacy of current statistical approaches, the problems with using current performance to predict future outcomes, and how short-term priorities and competition between sports for talented athletes undermine the overall efficiency of athlete development systems. These concerns form the basis for more focused discussion of avenues for future work in this field.