BBC News - The birthday paradox at the World Cup

http://wwwbbccom/news/magazine-27835311[17-J un-14 11:32:54 AM]

warm handshake between Benedikt Howedes of Germany and Saphir
Taider of Algeria - they share the pain of celebrating their real birthday
just once every four years, because both were born on 29 February.
At this point the statistically inclined might be asking a few questions.
Maybe the sample size is too small to demonstrate the point
convincingly?
We can respond to that by adding in the squads from the 2010 World
Cup, too. That yields another 15 shared birthdays, making 31 out of 64
squads over the two world cups - still pretty close to 50%.
These results give us pretty much what you'd expect if birthdays were
randomly distributed, but there's a healthy argument in sporting circles
about whether that's true in a group like this.
The explanation
Here's a simple explanation of maths behind the birthday paradox. More
elegant and sophisticated versions can be found on the internet.
Imagine you walk into a room of 22 people, none of whom have a
birthday in common. The chances you'll have a unique birthday feel
pretty high - there are only 22 days taken by the others, and 343 days
free, so you'd fancy your chances that no-one shares your birthday.
This may be one reason the birthday paradox feels counter-intuitive.
We tend to view problems like this from our own individual perspective,
and for any individual the chances of sharing a birthday are low.
But let's work out the probability that everyone in that group of 23 has a
unique birthday.
For person 1, the chances are 100% because every date is clear. For
person two, there's one day they would share with person 1, but the
other 364 are clear, so their chance of a unique birthday is 364/365.
For person 3 it's 363/365, and so on through to person 23, whose
probability of having a unique birthday is 343/365.
To find the probability of everyone in the group having unique
birthdays, we multiply all those 23 probabilities together, and if we do
we end up with a probability of 0.491.
The probability that a birthday is shared is therefore 1 - 0.491, which
comes to 0.509, or 50.9%.
Benedkt Howedes of Germany (left) and Saphir Taider of Algeria were both born on 29 February
BBC News - The birthday paradox at the World Cup
http://wwwbbccom/news/magazine-27835311[17-J un-14 11:32:54 AM]
But if that is the probability that any two people in a group will share a
birthday, what about the probability that you will share a birthday with at
least one other person in a group? For that to be greater than 50%, you'd
need to have a group of 253 people. Perhaps your friends in social media
might be the best place to look.
The theory is that in sports, there are advantages to having a birthday
that's just after the cut-off date for school or team selection. When you're
young, if your birthday is just after that date, you're going to be oldest
and likely most physically developed of your year group.
This natural advantage makes is more likely you'll make it onto a sporting
team, that you'll perform well and get more attention from the coach. This
then feeds back into better performance, setting up an enduring
advantage over peers with less fortunate birthdays.
It's a complicated and controversial idea. In 2006, Steven Levitt and
Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame proposed that people born in the
early months of the year would be overrepresented at the World Cup that
year. They based this on the decision by Fifa in 1997 to make 1 J anuary
the age cut-off for international soccer competitions.
Levitt ended up backtracking after someone analysed World Cups prior to
2006 and found this wasn't the case. Levitt suggested that age cut-offs
for domestic competitions might vary between countries, conflicting with
the Fifa date and complicating the effect.
For the 2014 World Cup players, the four months with the most birthdays
are J anuary (71), February (77), March (68) and May (72). These are all
above the 61 birthdays a month you'd expect if they were evenly
distributed.
And the months with the fewest birthdays all come in the second half of
the year: August (57), October (46), November (49) and December (51).
The 2010 data show the same thing - above average early in the year,
below average towards the end.
This is just a quick look at the figures and not a definitive analysis, but it
Bosnia Herzegovina's Asmir Begovic and Sead Kolasinac's birthday falls the day before their team faces
Nigeria