EURO 2020: Will athletes’ early or late specialisation tell us who will win?

Photo by Baylee Gramling on Unsplash

Late Specialisation as a concept

Photo by Robert Anderson on Unsplash

EURO 2020 and my curiosity

Example of the career information for Italy’s Ciro Immobile in Wikipedia

A dive into the data

Youth career

+----------------+---------------------------------+
| team | Median age youth career started |
+----------------+---------------------------------+
| Belgium | 5.5 |
| Denmark | 7 |
| England | 7 |
| Spain | 8 |
| Switzerland | 8 |
| Italy | 9 |
| Czech Republic | 11 |
| Ukraine | 13 |
+----------------+---------------------------------+

Senior career

Age

+----------------+------------+
| team | Median Age |
+----------------+------------+
| England | 25.0 |
| Ukraine | 25.0 |
| Spain | 26.0 |
| Italy | 26.5 |
| Switzerland | 27.0 |
| Czech Republic | 28.0 |
| Denmark | 28.0 |
| Belgium | 29.0 |
+----------------+------------+

Which team will be the winner?

Photo by Radek Kozák on Unsplash

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Data enthusiast, Machine Learning fan. Doing data work at the BBC

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