http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0572-0640 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0572-0640
Talent identification and talent development are ubiquitous features of contemporary sport. Identifying, recruiting, developing, supporting and managing talent are fundamental activities of clubs, as well as the wider sports system, and the rewards for dealing with them successfully can be considerable. In some ways, talent represents the “Holy Grail” of sport: it is evasive, often mistaken, and easily lost.
Despite its importance to modern sport, talent is much less well understood than is often assumed. There have been decades of empirical research, of course, but this has often been over-generalized and under-theorized. In addition, studies of talent identification and development in sport have, until relatively recently, presumed simplistic constructs of talent, ignoring insights from cognate fields like cognitive and developmental psychology, behavioural genetics and philosophy. And even as theoretical and empirical work in this area has advanced and become progressively more sophisticated and nuanced, it has rarely trickled down to the day-to-day practices of clubs and coaches. This is why, I think, we still hear talk of “spot them young and drive them through the system” (alarmingly, a comment from a government adviser for sport), and cohorts of young players are divided into “the talented” and the rest, who are then rejected and expelled from the system. One of the many virtues of this collection of articles is that makes clear the inherent complexity of any talent identification process. Matthew Reeves and his colleagues have managed to retain a sense of caution and humility when examining this much-misunderstood phenomenon, and a variety of methods utilized in these papers reflects a proper recognition that they are pursuing something multifaceted and multidimensional. This is as it should be. Talent identification is not just a technical problem, it is also a moral problem: judgements made about typically very young players can affect the rest of their lives. You may remember the film “Minority Report”, in which the hero, played by the actor Tom Cruise, is charged with arresting people for crimes they are predicted to commit in the future. This is harmless Hollywood fluff, of course, because it is impossible to predict how events will turn out in the future. Except this is not fantasy, as the ability to predict the future is a foundational belief of almost all talent programmes. And if you do believe that you have discovered a method for telling the future, please get in touch as I have some life insurance to sell you!
Talent is an emerging set of attributes, and clues about its identification and manifestation need to be balanced by an acknowledgement of its inherent complexity and unpredictability. This essential tension between our growing knowledge and the open future makes talent identification such as exciting topic of research. This special issue succeeds in capturing this excitement, both with its individual papers, and as a collective. It’s also a good read!