Here is the Link to the paper:

We show that soccer-spefic skills and physiology features have the highest predictive power regarding the probability that a youth soccer player stays at a youth academy for at least another season.

Happy to share that our paper regarding talent selection in youth academies was published last week.

@jon_wertheim in case you need a quick summary of our paper ;) and no, unfortuanely my backhand is two-handed.

Our findings thus offer important implications for tournament organisers in both sports contexts and daily life settings. If they can select the participants to compete (e.g., for a job promotion), they should realise that including dominant competitors has a detrimental effect.

Last, shadow effects of superstars also increase the probability of retirement (walkover or within a match) of strong but non-superstar competitors.

In addition, the shadow effects are only statistically significant in tournaments with a surface which a superstars favours (e.g. Nadal on clay or Federer on grass) and in seasons in which superstats were very dominant.

Furthermore, the effects are more pronounced when multiple superstars compete in the tournament and when a superstar is expected in the next round, and disappear once all superstars have been eliminated.

And indeed, we show that the presence of superstars reduces the probability that the remaining Top 20 players win their matches. Such shadow effects arise even in very early tournament stages, in which favoured players lose more often than expected.

Anticapting the reduced probability of winning the tournament, favourite top players might already put less effort in matches prior to matches against a superstar, as their option value (the price of staying in knockout tournaments) is reduced.

We use data from men's professional tennis from 2004 to 2019 and define @DjokerNole , @RafaelNadal , @rogerfederer and @andy_murray as superstars. Theoretically, superstar participation in tournaments reduces the probability that the remaining top players can win the tournament.

I'm really happy that our paper (joint work with @C_Deutscher and Lena Neuberg) got published in JEP recently: We show that the presence of superstars in tournamnets has a negative effect on effort provision of their main competitors.