Des Ryan lives on the west coast of Ireland and gets over to watch Arsenal only about three times a season. It was pure fluke that the director of sports and physical wellbeing at the University of Galway was at the Emirates Stadium last weekend, when Max Dowman became the youngest ever scorer in the Premier League. He admits to getting “quite emotional” – just a few years ago he was looking after Dowman in the under-12s.
“If you’re an academy specialist, then seeing the young people get their debuts, that’s your trophy,” says Ryan, who headed the Arsenal academy’s athletic development for nine years. He knows well that while Dowman’s abilities are uniquely precocious, his situation isn’t. Marli Salmon became Arsenal’s youngest defender when he made his senior debut at 16 in December, while Brando Bailey-Joseph replaced Gabriel Martinelli on the wing in a Champions League match in January, aged 17. As Ryan notes: “These older teenagers are playing adult sport, and excelling at it.”
Teenage talent is always captivating, but recently there seems to have been a glut of it. In Brazil last week the skateboarder Sky Brown won her second world championship at 17, but by this point, she’s an old hand: she took her first gold when she was 14, a year after becoming Britain’s youngest Olympic medallist with bronze in Tokyo. This makes her one of the few people in the world who could honestly relate to Luke Littler, a two-time darts world champion by the age of 18.
The snowboarder Mia Brookes was disappointed not to add a Winter Olympics medal to her successes at X Games and World Cups. Still, when you become slopestyle world champion one month after you turn 16, you’ve got plenty of time to add to your trophy cabinet. And it wasn’t that long ago that Britain’s 44-year wait for a women’s singles title in a grand slam was ended by an 18-year-old Emma Raducanu.
Is there a pattern here? Or is this parade of prodigies simply a mirage, the kind of optical illusion presented to every generation of ageing sports fans that thinks that England cricket captains, like policemen, are getting younger every year? Well, Jacob Bethell did become the youngest man to lead the side against Ireland in their Twenty20 series last September – at 21, he was two years younger than Monty Bowden, who had held the record since 1889. And in his squad was Rehan Ahmed, the youngest Englishman ever to play a Test.
All this is interesting because teenage sensations are supposed to be outliers, rarities, one-in-a-million miracles. The data is clear: peak performance age across a vast range of sports is only going one way, and that’s up. Between 1992 and 2021, the average ages of Olympians, male and female, increased by two years. Since 1990, the average age of professional men’s tennis players has increased from 24.6 to 28.6, while male cricketers and footballers are also competing at the highest level for longer.
And yet here we are, in a week when Bayern Munich were seriously considering putting the 16-year-old Leonard Prescott in goal in their Champions League fixture] on Wednesday (before Jonas Urbig managed to come back from a concussion injury), and when Sunderland reportedly offered £13m for Thiago Pitarch, the 18-year-old star of Real Madrid’s academy. Not to mention the 19-year-old Kimi Antonelli becoming the second-youngest grand prix winner in history – only Max Verstappen has taken the chequered flag sooner, as an 18-year-old in 2016.
In fact, Formula One may offer some clue to what is happening. There is, after all, no doubt that at the highest level of motor sport, competitors are getting younger: it’s right there in the grid-position graphics ahead, where the baby-faced images of Oliver Bearman, Isack Hadjar and Gabriel Bortoleto (all 21) look hopefully ahead to the championship aspirations of Oscar Piastri (25) and Lando Norris (26). Even Charles Leclerc and Verstappen, two of the most senior figures on the track, haven’t yet turned 30.
F1’s driver academies have evolved into some of the best funded and most advanced athlete development programmes in sport, at the cutting edge of identifying and fast-tracking talent. Technical advances – be that sports science, psychology or next-gen simulators – have made it possible to prepare drivers for the unique rigours of racing with less experience on track, and at a younger age, than in previous eras.
The Premier League has undergone a similar revolution in youth training through the elite player performance plan, introduced in 2012. Ryan worked in Irish rugby for 14 years before moving to Arsenal – whose academy is in the first of the EPPP’s four tiers – and says the system has put football in “a different world”. “It’s quite clear England are benefiting from it with lots of new talent,” he says. “When you have excellent resources, be it physical, medical, psychological, social, educational, that does increase player readiness.”
Sean Cumming, the professor in paediatric exercise science at the University of Bath who helped introduce biobanding – under which athletes are grouped based on growth and maturation, rather than age – into English (and now Scottish) football, agrees. “The game itself is incredibly physical now – players are faster, more powerful, stronger. To compete at that level, you have to be able to physically compete against full-grown adults, and some of your late developers simply won’t be able to do that until about 20.
“But early developers who reach physical maturity at, say, 16, are getting better support than they’ve had previously. Athletes are in a very privileged position now in terms of the knowledge and awareness of how to support them.” In category-one academies in the Premier League, for instance, young footballers are guided through “developmentally appropriate” strength and conditioning – “not putting heavy weights on kids, but teaching them technique so that when they are ready to benefit from weight training, they’re ready to go very quickly.”
There is still need for caution: while investment in sports science and coaching is “definitely paying off” in English football, says Cumming, it’s important to remember that even early developers’ bodies are still growing and completing into their early 20s, meaning they remain susceptible to injuries, and workloads need to be carefully managed. And Ryan, too, has reservations about the appropriateness of putting youth athletes into adult sport in all situations, particularly in football.
“At the end of the day, the male brain doesn’t mature till 23 – they can do silly things, make mistakes, they need people around them. So while I’d highlight the safeguarding, security, education, player care, mentoring that’s in place in category one academies, I’d have concerns about young people being fed into the adult dressing rooms below that.”
