IN THE last couple of months, several interesting stories regarding kids in sport have been exposed.

Last month, it was revealed that Liverpool Football Club had concealed forbidden inducements given to an 11-year-old Stoke City schoolboy and his family as an incentive to join the Anfield club's academy system and after the FA found the club guilty of "tapping up" the boy, they were fined £100,000.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, it was revealed that Manchester City are being scrutinised by the Premier League following the signing of another 11-year-old boy into their academy system after concerns were flagged up that the strict protocols that are in place may have been breached.

These two cases highlight the desperation of football clubs to get a hold of a player who shows exceptional talent, no matter what age they are.

If you get them young, you can, the theory goes, develop the player and cultivate a loyalty to the club that will either produce a first-team player or an individual of high sell-on value in the long-term. In theory, this makes sense. But in practice, encouraging children to become what is, in effect, semi-professional athletes before they are even teenagers is seriously flawed.

Part of the problem is that the stories of the few, exceptional child prodigies are widely known. Andre Agassi was playing tennis for hours each week at the age of four and Michelle Wie picked up a golf club at a similarly precocious age.

Everyone knows that Maria Sharapova moved from Russia to America at the tender age of seven while Tiger Woods was the youngest of the lot, swinging a golf club for the first time at the age of just two. The problem with these success stories, though, is that they feed the myth that taking up one particular sport early is the way forward. For every Woods or Agassi, however, there will be literally countless other early specialisers who achieve nothing on the world stage.

This week, Chelsea signed 15-year-old Billy Gilmour from Rangers for a fee in the region of £500,000 – a player whose only exposure to first-team football is a couple of training sessions at Auchenhowie with the senior squad.

The incentives to promote early specialisation may seem obvious, particularly if you believe in Malcolm Gladwell’s famous theory which states that 10,000 hours of practice is “the magic number for true expertise”. This is almost certainly why those who favour early specialisation believe that the younger a child focuses on a particular sport, the earlier they will become “expert” in it. While the 10,000-hours theory may be true in almost all walks of life, evidence suggests that sport may be one of the few areas that contradicts this rule.

The stories of early specialisation are striking and, so often, parents and coaches are so blinded by the prospect of developing a child from a toddler into an Olympic champion that they fail to recognise that they are not, in fact, using the most productive method.

A study by Karin Moesch, a sports psychologist at the University of Copenhagen, showed that in general elite athletes in swimming, cycling and running tended to specialise at a later age than “nearly-elites”. In addition, the study found that early specialisation is, more often than not, negated by the time kids reach their late teenage years anyway, with the amount of training hours evening-out by the age of 18 whether the child started exceptionally young or not. David Epstein, author of the lauded book The Sports Gene, is another who believes the early specialisation method is fundamentally flawed and, in most cases, truly counter-productive.

To encourage a young child to train in the manner of a professional athlete is becoming more and more common and is folly for a number of further reasons. The risk of, to use the technical term, scunnering the kid is exceptionally high. The chance of burn-out or injury is also heightened and, often, encouraging early specialisation has the complete opposite effect to what was intended.

Early signs of talent in children are so often erroneous. Nascent promise can be due to physical advantage which will, sooner or later, be negated as the child and their peers grow older. Similarly, natural talent accounts for a tiny percentage of what makes up a successful elite athlete, with work ethic and mindset far more determinative when it comes to "making it" in the world of elite sport.

Taking part in multiple sports at a young age is so spectacularly beneficial in the long-run that it is baffling why anyone would do anything different. Taking part in a variety of sports develops a far wider skill-set which invariably benefits the sport in which an individual ultimately chooses to specialise in. Statistics released in the past week or so by the Tracking Football website show that almost 90 per cent of 2017 NFL draft picks had played multiple sports in high school and, in fact, NFL scout Bucky Brooks said that having played multiple sports was something that he actively looked for in a player.

There will always be the few early specialisers who excel but the evidence is overwhelming in showing that it is, in general, a detrimental path to go down. That we are at the stage that football clubs are going to extreme lengths to secure the signatures of pre-teens indicates that the late specialisation message has not yet reached the sport. Let's hope it does sooner rather than later because not only will it be of benefit to the young players, it will be of huge benefit to the clubs too.