Welcome to the age of the sporting superkid

On Lamine Yamal’s 19th birthday earlier this month, he did what he always does: entertained an audience.

The crowd was somewhat smaller than the many thousands he is used to: a full house of reporters gathered to hear him speak the day before Spain’s World Cup semi-final against France rather than a stadium full of football fans. But the 19-year-old — who has already lifted three La Liga titles, a European Championship and now the World Cup — kept them just as captivated as if he had a ball at his feet.

Birthday presents? He hadn’t received many yet, he said. But he knew exactly what he wanted: “A trip to New York.” He got his wish, and then went one further in helping Spain’s men conquer the world for the second time.

Much has been made of Yamal’s age, and rightly so. “He’s a leader on the pitch who makes the difference at 18 — something we’ve only seen with Lionel Messi, Diego Maradona, Pele and maybe Ronaldo,” wrote former Barcelona player and manager Xavi in a column for The Athletic before that semi-final.

It was Xavi who gave Yamal his debut for Barcelona at 15 years, nine months and 16 days (the youngest player to appear for the Spanish club’s first team in over a century) after seeing a boy who was “something different, something special. He dribbled really well. He made excellent decisions, rarely made mistakes. We said, ‘Bloody hell, this boy’s different’.”

Different, yes. But as a sporting prodigy, Yamal is far from alone.

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, 15, became India’s youngest international cricketer two weeks ago and this week became the youngest player ever to make an international T20 half-century. Gout Gout, the 18-year-old Australian sprinter, is widely tipped to be a star of the 2028 Olympics. Russian tennis player Mirra Andreeva became the youngest French Open women’s champion since Monica Seles in 1992 when she won in Paris this year aged 19.

The list goes on.

Italy’s Kimi Antonelli, who became the third-youngest driver in Formula 1 history at the 2025 Australian Grand Prix, then aged 18, is well clear in the drivers’ standings in the 2026 World Championship. And at the Tour de France, 19-year-old French road cyclist Paul Seixas became the youngest debutant in the race’s 89-year history this month and is still in contention for a place on the overall podium and to win the white jersey (awarded to the highest-placed rider aged 26 or under in the general classification).

There’s more — Arsenal’s Max Dowman, darts phenom Luke Littler, swimmer Summer McIntosh and basketball star Cooper Flagg have all been talked about as potential game-changers in their sports. All are still teenagers.

Prodigies have always been a feature of sport, as has the hype which attends them. But they’ve often felt like outliers — one-offs who have arrived among the world’s elite long before logic and reason say they should (Martina Hingis, Wayne Gretzky and Nadia Comaneci, plus many others). Now, though, it feels like we are seeing them crop up at far greater frequency.

Is this just the new normal?

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The ideal way to answer that would be to see the numbers, says Joe Eisenmann, who has 30 years of experience as a professor, researcher, sport scientist, coach educator, strength-and-conditioning coach and youth sport coach.

It feels like we are seeing more athletes break through at younger ages, but Eisenmann questions whether that perception is based more in cognitive bias than fact.

“Those kids stand out,” he says. “Youth captures us just like speed captures humans. We love the 100-metre dash. We love fast things. Youth captures us as well. So we’re drawn to those young athletes when they break into professional sport.”

The world is a smaller place than it used to be. If a 16-year-old today breaks a world record on the other side of the globe, news of it can reach us in seconds. We can see footage of it almost instantly. If we scour their social media forensically enough, we can find out what they eat for breakfast and how many pets they have.

“We’re just more globalised,” Eisenmann says. “When these youngsters do break through, the whole world is hearing about it, as opposed to 20 to 30 years ago when, for the most part, you just knew what happened nationally and locally.”

Physicality and standards at the elite level are higher than ever. So it’s arguably more difficult for young athletes to break through.

Research has shown that footballers have become taller over the past six seasons. They’re quicker, too. Several studies have estimated that players rarely broke the 30-kilometre-per-hour barrier in the 1970s and ’80s. According to FIFA stats, 35 players ran at speeds over 35km/h (21.7mph) during the 2026 World Cup.

“It’s a much more athletic game,” says Dr Sean Cumming, a senior lecturer at the University of Bath in England and internationally recognised as a leading expert on growth and maturation in sports. “So you could make a strong argument that for a regular 16-year-old coming through nowadays, it would be much more challenging than it would have been in the old days, when the physical differences were probably not quite as apparent.”

The counterargument to this is that sport has also become a bigger industry in modern times — one that allows many sports to dedicate exceptional resources to identifying and developing young talent.

“There are very few talented six-year-olds out there in soccer that most Premier League clubs will not be aware of, due to their broad scouting systems,” Cumming points out. And it’s not just the Premier League — Yamal was six when he was scouted by Barcelona while playing for his local team nearby.

But how early is it really possible to spot talent?

“It’s very difficult,” says Cumming. “Most academies would say that you really can’t identify talent at five or six, apart from the occasional screaming talent, but even that’s a big ask. We have that whole period of puberty where children transform significantly, and you don’t know what’s going to come out at the end. For example, will the athlete have those physical qualities that are going to be necessary for success at the top level?”

If it’s so tricky, why do academies take the risk? Why not wait a few years?

“It’s the fear of missing out,” says Cumming. “That one Messi might be in the system, and if you’re not picking them up at the same time as the other clubs, you’re going to miss them.”

While talent identification is tricky at such a young age, talent development is simpler — at least for those with the right resources.

Youth sport has become increasingly professionalised over the past decade or so. Academy athletes are undergoing systematic physical training they previously would not have been exposed to until much later. These days, being a teenager in professional sport means access to formal strength-and-conditioning regimens and elite skills coaches, usually outside the training they do with their team.

“It’s quite common now for a kid to play for their team, then come home and go to a third-party facility to get more skills training,” says Eisenmann. “And maybe to have their own strength-and-conditioning coach as well. That’s all happening from the age of 10 or 11.

“Younger athletes are getting better and more systematic training at an early age.”

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Early sport specialisation can, according to some research, have a negative impact. A child engaging in intense training for a single sport, and excluding others, risks overuse injuries, diminished generalised motor skill ability, psychological stress and burnout.

Nevertheless, Eisenmann says early sports specialisation is here to stay. The key, he says, is to “find the best ways to continue to develop them holistically and to keep them healthy and happy. If we can do that, we can do early sports specialisation right”.

What does that look like in reality? It means ensuring young athletes are exposed to a variety of movement patterns — not only those specific to their No 1 sport. It means finding ways to keep the sport enjoyable. And it means valuing time off with family and friends.

“Those organisations that are aware of the potential negative consequences and know what to do about them are doing the best they can for those who choose to specialise early in sport,” says Eisenmann.

A key part of youth development (and talent identification) centres on understanding growth and maturation and better identifying where an athlete sits in that process at all times.

Cumming was approached by English football’s Premier League in 2015 to help club academies determine “biological ages” (as opposed to their youngsters’ actual ages), enabling them to group players together based on a percentage of their predicted adult stature.

“We now know which children may be benefiting from being early developers, who are physical and dominant, versus those who are ‘on time’ or versus those who might struggle to stay in the system — the late developers,” explains Cumming. “So it’s much more possible for the coaches and the academies to understand why one child may be thriving while another one, who is technically gifted, may be struggling because of lack of development.”

It also means they know how much more growing there is to come.

Cumming gives an example from tennis, where he studied the first- and second-ranked players in the country at under-13s level. The top seed was 6ft 2in (188cm), very physical and very dominant, and had already gone through puberty. “We could tell from the assessments he maybe had one year of growth left. He was going to be tall, but was probably successful at 13 because he was almost fully grown.”

The other player was an inch shorter, but showed signs of being a late developer. “We knew straight away that this kid had about five or six years’ worth of growth left in them. They hadn’t gone through puberty. They were also No 2 in the country — so technically, tactically, physically, pretty darn good.”

Cumming and his team predicted the player would end up 6ft 8in (203cm) when fully grown, and that’s precisely what happened. And he went on to be more successful than the other athlete in the long term.

“Those late developers have to be incredibly good technically, tactically and psychologically to make up for the temporary physical differences they’ve got,” says Cumming. “And eventually that technical ability will come to the fore, once those physical differences are taken away.”

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Between the ages of 15 and 16, Yamal’s physical appearance changed considerably. Reports were that he had gained around 10 centimetres (four inches) in height.

In childhood, we grow at a steady rate of four to five centimetres per year, but when we reach 85 per cent of our adult height, there’s an acceleration, termed the growth spurt. It’s no longer steady growth, but saltatory, meaning there are periods of rapid growth followed by periods of stasis while the rest of the body adapts and catches up.

From age nine in the academies, children are measured every three to four months. During a growth spurt, some football clubs will move to measuring every six weeks, and Cumming said it’s not impossible to see anywhere near 20cm worth of growth per year at the point when the growth spurt is most rapid.

For young athletes, the growth spurt can be — but isn’t always — disruptive, leading to adolescent awkwardness and associated dips in performance, plus growth-related injuries, such as Osgood-Schlatter disease (a common cause of knee pain) and pars fractures (a stress fracture in the small bridge of bone that connects consecutive vertebrae in your spine).

In the past, a disruptive growth spurt could have led to an athlete falling out of favour, or, in the case of former Real Madrid player and Wales international Gareth Bale, almost being let go from Southampton’s academy.

“He was a standout player, all of a sudden going through a growth spurt at 15 and having a big dip in performance,” says Cumming. “Fortunately, somebody in the academy recognised that he was in his growth spurt, and he was saved by one vote. They adapted his training programmes to focus on core strength, balance and related areas. And he came out of it within about six months and went on to be a very, very successful player.”

Now, clubs have the tools to identify when players are in their growth spurt and adapt their training accordingly. “We refer to it as ‘Growers club’,” says Cumming.

The hope is that, by being more aware and making those adaptations, the athlete is better protected against growth-related injuries, and clubs won’t make any rash decisions based on a likely temporary dip in form.

How close are we, then, to having to change the view that Yamal, Sooryavanshi, Gout and the rest are outliers and see them instead as the new normal — a natural consequence of better talent identification and development from a younger age?

“I don’t think it’s something that we would see as being a rarity anymore,” says Cumming, referring specifically to football, which he describes as being “ahead of the game”. Investment in that sport dwarfs that of many others, although F1 teams, such as Red Bull, have academies supporting young drivers with in-seat time, simulator time, fitness and nutrition.

“It’s still relatively infrequent, but it’s becoming more prevalent,” Cumming says. “It is largely down to the demand, the ability to identify and develop those top players, and the resources within the game just now.”