ABSTRACT
Over the past 40 years, an increasing number of sports organisations from around the world have adopted talent identification (TI) and talent development (TD) programmes (collectively TID) to help uncover and nurture the next generation of sporting superstars. Professional sports clubs, national governing bodies, high-performance agencies, elite training institutes, and youth development academies, most notably in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, China, and Qatar, now routinely implement TID programmes in the belief that, by identifying young individuals with sporting potential early, these fledgling prospects can engage in, and accumulate, the 10 years or 10,000 hours of ‘deliberate practice’ (i.e., highly structured, goal-directed, and effortful activity) thought to be a prerequisite for expert performance in sport (see Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993; Gladwell, 2008). Recently, however, the efficacy of TID programmes has come under scrutiny because, not only do these initiatives have a strong tendency to encourage early specialisation, which may actually hinder progression towards the attainment of sporting excellence by contributing to the development of physical (e.g., overuse injuries) and psychosocial (e.g., burnout, dropout) issues (e.g., Baker, 2003; DiFiori et al., 2014; Feeley, Agel, & LaPrade, 2016), they also typically have a weak scientific basis and lack a sound theoretical rationale, resulting in them having questionable validity and, ultimately, limited predictive power (e.g., Abbott & Collins, 2002; Vaeyens, Lenoir, Williams, & Philippaerts, 2008).
