BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sport Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicRelative Age Effect in Sports: Talent Identification, Performance, and Fair PracticesView all 6 articles
Where age doesn't matter: No relative age effects in esports at the professional level
Provisionally accepted
- Universitetet i Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract Relative age effects (i.e., a systematic bias favouring individuals born earlier in the selection year) have been found in many traditional sports, especially among younger athletes in sports where physical maturation (e.g., increased size and strength) is advantageous. The aim of this study was to explore relative age effects in professional esports, which differ from traditional sports in some key areas. The birth months of 15,734 e-sport athletes playing ten different games were collected from Liquipedia and analyzed using chi-square tests. The analyses showed no practically meaningful relative age effects among the athletes, indicating that being relatively older does not yield advantages in gameplay. The same results applied across the various age groups as well as the different game types. This lack of relative age effects can likely be attributed to the cognitive and skill-based nature of esports, as well as the flexible and online nature of competitive environments in this domain
Keywords: electronic sports, Galatea Effect, Gaming, Pygmalion effect, Matthew effect
Received: 05 Sep 2025; Accepted: 24 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Laxdal and Erikstad. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Aron Laxdal, aron.laxdal@uia.no
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.