Is there a correlation between birth order and family size to future football position?
In this section of the site, I allow myself to introduce also articles from which the scientific benefit may not be high, but they are interesting and open the mind to another way of thinking.
This is another classic article from a very prestigious journal called the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Traditionally the journal releases a Christmas edition each year, with articles standing in the highest methodological criteria (research hypothesis, methods, statistics etc.), but are a bit unusual with original ideas and answering questions from everyday lives.
This article (PMID 14684656), was published on 2003 by a British doctor with 3 young boys. He thought that the birth order may have an influence on the football position his boys will play. More or less in his words – he thought that the oldest will be forward, and his youngest will be a goalie.
The author sent a questionnaire to every member of the British Premier League, but got replays from only 3 (out of 20) clubs. He then changed tactics, and sent the questionnaire to 24 clubs from the lower English Football League. He got replays from 14 teams, and collected data from 232 players (23 goalies, 72 defenders, 68 midfielders and 69 forwards).
And the results are:
The average size of families was significantly different between different positions. For example, a goalie has only 1.13 siblings in average, a defender 1.79, a midfielder had 2.4 and a forward had 2.4. I cannot find any logical explanation for these findings.
In addition, checking birth order of only the boys in the family has revealed that a defender has a higher chance of being the oldest sibling, and the forward has the lowest chance. These last two findings did not have any statistical significance.
It is hard to determine if there is really a point to all of this, but you have to admit, it is kind of interesting.
And for the nostalgic anecdote – use Wikipedia to see if one of your football childhood heroes is a firstborn, a middle child or the youngest in the family.
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