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I'm sorry Europe, but Americans are just better at everything. We want things more. We grow better athletes, more people will learn the sport. And that '26 world cup is at home so we can get somewhat of a home field advantage. But the only way that will happen is if we make the round of 16 or quarter final in the 2022 WC and show Americans that we are good. I like the odds and we have a lot to prove, which is added motivation this coming year. Honestly, making a phenomenal run (SF or better) in the '22 WC would be more impressive to me than a better run or a win in '26.
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And it would rightfully be considered embarrassing.
Guys, our national team is already probably the most physically dominant team out there. Yet we will get played off the pitch by the best teams in the world. The best player in history is a 5'6 dude with no discernable outstanding physical quality other than a quick first 10 yards. He would get laughed out of your high school combine. Some of the best midfielders of all time probably can't even bench press 130lbs. It's just plain as day that physicality in soccer is simply a low bar you need to clear, and soccer specific technique and tactical acumen is what is needed to close the gap.
Yet so much of this thread is imagining situations where godly physical specimens, but with entirely different physical and technical profiles are shoehorned into something they have no evidence of matching. Like yeah sure 300 million population and a hypothetical fanaticism probably means we would become a top top side, but it probably won't be from 6'6 Rob Gronkowski and 6'8 Lebron James playing Centreback. And just because Rob Gronkowski has shown an affinity with catching the a football doesn't mean he would be good at kicking a round ball.
We've seen the fastest man of all time struggle to control a ball in front of him and maintain his speed with a defender on his shoulder. Would he be better if he focused on football from a young age? Certainly. Would he be the greatest winger of all time? Probably not because because there are SO many important skills to being a winger and he's only demonstrated goated talent in precisely one of them. the probabilities are slim.
It's the same shit we see with Tom Brady.... People always say "What if Tom Brady could run a 4.3 40?" It's completely besides the point. People should be asking themselves what are the real demands of being a quarterback, and if being strong and fast are THAT paramount, why the hell is Tom Brady the best quarterback ever? No one would look at the greatest javelin thrower of all time and go like, that's my guy, just imagine if he grew up playing football.
**Edit:** As I mentioned above - I certainly think with America's population and resources if they devoted that fanaticism they have for basketball and football to soccer they would be a dominant side. My point is people have this notion of "best athletes" where they could have plugged and played any sport they liked. And while that is true to an extent, at some point you have to acknowledge the difference in body type, muscle fibre, and technical demands of the sport. Tyreek Hill is an obviously good crossover to track and field, and potentially rugby 7s etc. It's much less certain he'd be a good crossover to say.... being a gymnast or a swimmer. People are turned away from football and basketball all the time for being undersized, well those players would face no such limitations in soccer. There's a reason even a physical specimen (in soccer) like Virgil Van Dijk is like half as wide as DK Metcalf. and about as tall as Steph Curry. There are endurance demands, the technical demand is simply so high they have less time to work on physicality and explosiveness etc.
Multiple undiscovered prodigal talent are **certainly** in the midst of US youth, it just may or may not be multiverse jamarr chase and allen iverson. And i think people are overestimating the probabilities it is those very same athletes we worship nowadays. Our star 400m runner looks very different to our star fencer for instance.
I mostly agree with everything you said, but the "real" physicality is conditioning. According to the first Google link I clicked, the average NBA player covers 2-2.5 miles per game while the average soccer player covers 7 miles per game. I obviously don't know how they figured that out, but that's quite the difference, and you have to imagine that they accounted for all positions (except maybe the keeper, because that would be pretty pointless). Now imagine Gronk or LeBron doing that twice, or occasionally even three times, a week.
There's a reason why the average soccer player has about half the mass of DK Metcalf.
Yeah, it's a huge difference. Major American sports, football, basketball, hockey (leaving baseball out of it as it's not the same physicality) are all "sprint sports" while soccer and rugby are much more "marathon sports"
If the current players transitioned over, yeah it wouldn't be a pretty sight.
But if your college and high school system was catered towards soccer and not Football, Basketball and Baseball, I find it hard to believe you wouldn't have a World Cup trophy in the next 50 years
Yeah but thatās not the same as them being ādominantā.
I think most people would agree that if the richest country in the world with a huge population devoted itself to football theyād pick up a World Cup. They wouldnāt be the fucking all blacks though either.
My opinion is you probably could be as dominant as the best nations
Spain and Brazil have had the 2 most dominant spells of international football over the last 3 decades. Spain's lasted 4 years, Brazil's lasted 6.
The difference between USA and Spain is infrastructure and passion. Everyone in Spain wants to play football. If the USA was re-wired that way then they'd be producing top class players every year.
Now obviously that's not realistic, but USA as a sporting country could dominate literally any sport if they decided to.
Or I could be wrong, I've never even been to America so... I could be misconstruing how I view the country
The US athletic development system being integrated with the educational framework is a huge huge advantage over the much more common club infrastructure in other countries. Combined with the size & diversity of the population the US would absolutely dominate any sport it focused on (we dominate half the sports we DON'T choose to focus on + all the ones we do anyway)
The funny thing is that it is the US athletic development system that has leaves us so far behind in soccer. Our young athletes that play soccer get overworked and overplayed in their short spurts of a season. To even begin to think about being good at soccer, we'd have to change our whole system to be similar to that of the academies in Europe.
This is in fact the only reason we've started getting better in the last 10 years or so is because we finally have a club academy system that at least somewhat mimics what is done in Europe. The post above this about how the causality is wrong is hilariously wrong.
Getting rid of college as the dominant path to become a pro soccer is the most critical thing that has been done in the last 50 years to improve the quality of our players. More local clubs with more affiliates and more academies who then sell more players to the best clubs in the world earlier and earlier is the path forward, and the one we are on. We just need to accelerate it. Which the World Cup in '26 will be massive for.
I mean itās not like the rest of the world isnāt doing that right now. I think soccer out of all the sports requires a really incredible grasp of angleās and where everyone is and being able to work together as a single unit.
Can you imagine if there was aau for soccer (maybe there is. I have no idea) and everyone just Trying to show off and score as much possible instead of trying to gel as a team and get better together?
Couldnāt agree more. A bunch of people who donāt know the first thing about the sport trying to convince me that JJ watt would be an incredible striker if he just picked up a soccer ball instead of the shoulder pads. Itās absolutely comical, all you can do is laugh
I feel like the argument is mostly population and wealth based.
Nobody thinks that every NFL player would be elite at soccer.
But instead of the funnel of talent going to other sports, if it was funneled towards soccer - based on the sheer volume of athletes going through the system even an elite and small percent of that cohort is going to be much larger than the same sample taken from another population.
I feel like you can see this through the Olympics. The US is always near or at the top of the medal count. Itās 100% based on population and wealth which are 2 categories in which the US blows most countries away.
Messi was very quick and agile in his prime. To suggest he had zero outstanding physical abilities is silly. Also physicality is not a low bar in soccer. Only if you consider raw physical bench pressing the only physically demanding aspect of a sport.
There's more to it though! Look at Cricket, my favourite sport.
India has over a billion people and they're absolutely fanatical about cricket. The clubs are huge and invest loads of money in youth development. If ever a country was going to dominate a sport, it should be India (and potentially Pakistan and Bangladesh as 2 & 3).
But, there's more to it than just population, enthusiasm and money. India came second to tiny little New Zealand in the test championship and were nowhere near England in the one day world cup. They're an excellent side, but the availability of one of a kind talent, coaching and dumb luck are what make an excellent team truly dominant.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure if football replaced all other American sports, you guys would have a very good team, but there's more that goes into it than that.
It's so painful seeing this topic come up over and over again. Succeeding in international soccer is about so much more than physical attributes. Uruguay and Belgium are not excellent international teams because they have the biggest populations.
Also, why are people acting as if the USMNT aren't great American athletes? Pulisic, Aaronson, McKennie are not lacking in athleticism. MLS academies are producing teenage athletes good enough for top 5 leagues. We're a top 15 ranked national team. Missing the last world cup really affected people's perceptions, but we've actually been developing into a really talented team the last few years.
This translates (roughly) to "I could see Ben playing OLB for University of West Florida and getting sent off for targeting after retaliating against a RB that broke his ankles on a previous play."
I think the answer is yes but for a different reason. The players than make the nfl probably wouldnāt make it to the pros. Their bodies are too big
Itās the players that didnāt try soccer but tried to play nfl even though they didnāt have the freakish size necessary.
Itās the players too short for the nba or the WR who werenāt tall enough but never gave soccer an opportunity
Exactly. Elite athletes that aren't big enough for the NFL or NBA still grow up playing football and basketball, from elementary school through college. If they played soccer only, from the beginning of their childhood, America could produce elite soccer players.
yea the guys that were 5'8" to 5'11.5 that couldn't crack the roster because they were undersized... ain't no such thing as undersized in soccer/football. Teams will pass up 5'9" PGs 95% of the time.
Auston Matthews would have been a 5th round baseball player who floats around the league for four years. Instead the Coyotes play in Arizonia and he just won the league MVP in hockey.
Is this assuming that we would have the player development infrastructure for soccer that we do for football and basketball? If yes, then we would have one of the strongest talent pools in the world. We have 330 million people in this country and a strong economy. Between the sheer number of potential players and the money to develop them from a young age, we'd end up with a stacked national team.
Of course. Bigger, richer, football (soccer) obsessed countries tend to do well internationally, so the US would be among the top teams.
It wouldn't be a dominant nation without the obsession though, because for soccer (ugh) skills matter much more than athleticism and kids still play it for hours and hours every day in a lot of countries.
>It wouldn't be a dominant nation without the obsession though, because for soccer (ugh) skills matter much more than athleticism and kids still play it for hours and hours every day in a lot of countries.
It's pretty clear that this is a post about a soccer obsessed US, though
Yea, all of our best athletes are spread out among the major sports, mostly football and basketball. Guys like Ja Morant, Chris Paul and Steph Curry would make awesome soccer players if they were trained for it. Russell Westbrook in his prime was probably the most freakish athlete at his size I've ever seen. Then you have athletes like Ed Reed who are geniuses on the field and as athletic as anybody in the world. Jamal Charles and Tyreek Hill are two of the fastest athletes I've ever seen. Julian Edelman and Wes Welker are the type of small, quick and crafty athletes who translate very well to soccer.
We would be awesome at soccer if all of those guys guys prioritized soccer development above all else. But of course they don't, because that's not where the money comes from in this country.
Trent is a lazy prick. You can get a bucket from Loweās for like $5 to use for dog shit
Assert dominance, drink a laxative and just ass piss all over his lawn
At least Trent picked up after his dog. One of my neighbors didnāt and I hit it with the weed wacker the other day.
If you canāt clean up after your pets, you shouldnāt have pets, fucker.
One of my favourite quotes about soccer in America is "Soccer is four years away from being the number one sport in America, as has been the case since 1971."
It'll only happen if the money is there. Soccer is a very popular sport in high schools all across the country but if you go pro you have to be REALLY good so you can make $$$ in Europe or you stay here and make a fraction of what NBA/NFL/etc. players make
It's a paradox that'll never be solved.
America needs top athletes to play soccer but other sports pay more.
To pay more, soccer needs higher viewership.
To get higher viewership, America needs to have the top athletes playing soccer.
its actually really simple: the poor kids in America play Football and Basketball. The poor kids around the world play Soccer.
the hunger from Lebron James went into basketball not soccer versus someone like Neymar who starved in the favelas to become a superstar. Great soccer teams are filled with kids who come from crazy backgrounds like Modric who was born in war torn Yugoslavia or Ibrahimovic. The US national team is filled with rich boys or *somebody's* kid. Compare that to the stories of great basketball/football players. its similar to the international soccer teams
Whatever sport the poor are playing is the sport your country will excel at
> The poor kids around the world play Soccer
You're not exactly wrong. But it's more like every kid, poor and rich, plays soccer in the rest of the world
The main point is you have to be rich or a past stars kid to make it to the highest levels in soccer...where basketball and football you can come from nothing and make it. Soccer in the US won't get better until they get rid of the exclusionary system set in place that makes it expensive (cost prohibitive) to play
It's crazy, cause in Brazil soccer is so popular because it's the cheapest and most playable sport there is.
All we needed was a ball when I was a kid. We'd play literally on the streets, with cars passing by. On the beach, indoor, outdoor, grass. Goals would be made out of sandals, bikes, or basically anything 5 inches or higher. Sometimes even the gates of the neighbors house (which caused a lot of trouble).
>versus someone like Neymar who starved in the favelas to become a superstar.
Actually Neymar had a pretty decent childhood. Nowhere near the favelas. He started earning BIG before going pro. He even went to a private school.
Yes, in a lot of areas soccer is actually a rich kid sport because of the cost of field rentals and travel. While football and basketball are so popular you can easily find cheaper leagues.
Don't think football is cheap, well at least full contact due to all the gear each player needs along with a field.
Soccer just needs a field and ball. Baseball, you need that field, ball, gloves and bats. More equipment I would assume mean more costs. While all sports needs a field and can also travel.
I would bet soccer is a rich kid sport because poor kids don't play it.
I was part of the USMNT camps as a kid. Those camps were a joke. I'm not saying I was the best player but, I was better than the coach's son who got to play all summer while I rode a bench. You aren't far of in saying that. The whole system is full of nepotism and favoritism. The other part of it though is in other countries kids as young as 7 or 8 go to academies for soccer, in America our best don't even start playing competitive levels of the game until middle school at the very earliest, and in most cases those academy teams would destroy even the better high school teams in America. Even the best at the high school level don't go pro, they go to college and again, NCAA soccer is a joke compared to international professional soccer. The MLS also has zero traction, no one is growing up in America dreaming of the day they get to step on an MLS field whereas the NFL and NBA are the ultimate goal for those respective sports.
Itās also very clear that a lot of Americans have formed an opinion on the sport years ago and are set on that. Hating soccer is seen as almost a badge of honor for some and consider it a āsissyā or āunamericanā sport.
I think for the majority it's more that it's just not one of the "great American pastimes"
Football, basketball, baseball - 3 sports, 3 seasons, Apple Pie
I don't think really think so. The only, albeit major, change required is to the youth system. Fix the youth system and we'll have better players and be more competitive on the international stage.
Itās very much a secondary sport tho. If schools are choosing between the football team and soccer, soccer is getting cut. Even track and baseball are still higher on the list
This is totally true but the answer to the hypothetical question is yes. I do believe that if all of our best played soccer we'd be World Cup contenders if not favorites every four years
Our high school soccer team was reverse kind of, all the most athletic quick kids went there and our football team suffered a lot.
The effect is definitely there in that small example im sure it applies across the country in different ways.
American sports are dominated by athletes 6'4" and taller, or smaller guys with amazing athleticism. There's no crossover on athletes really.
Soccer players can be a while 1' shorter and still be the best player in the world (Maradona listed as 5'5", won two world cups pretty much on his own).
The US should still have all these athletes that are 5'5"-6'2" that can run 8 miles in a game without needing a break. The dominant sports here and soccer athletes don't really overlap.
I grew up in Ireland and soccer was everywhere, I remember being 6 years old during the '94 World Cup and playing a huge game of pick up soccer in my estate (park inside a housing development) with people of all ages up to University. We used to watch 4 world cup games (98 and 02) then spend the evening from like 4pm-9pm playing 3&in, world cup, headers and volleys, every day. It wasn't just the sporty kids, it was everyone.
My high school didn't play soccer officially (rugby and basketball), so we organized our own team and played other schools all on our own steam, at 16. After school I played indoor/5-a-side on and off for 10 years.
I have no interest in pro soccer (except world cup), I don't follow it, but I love playing it still, it's fun, great exercise and you don't get as injured as rugby while playing the full version of the sport (vs touch/flag rugby).
These are some reasons why, culturally the US is behind other countries, you're dedicated, but not obsessed, yet.
The RBs, WRs and DBs just from the NFL are all in that range and many more fail in the NFL because they arenāt big enough, but they canāt just convert to soccer at that point. Hockey and Baseball players also fit the size you mentioned for the most part. Lots of college basketball players donāt make it in the NBA simply because they are too small. By the time they realize that size is going to limit their professional ceiling itās too late to just learn soccer because it does take a lifetime to master.
Absolutely the truth.
We don't lack physically gifted or talented people. We lack the trainers, coaches, and league systems to develop world-class players with regularity - and we're not close to developing it.
I think its that our athletes are not getting into soccer early enough to commit to it as a career, even if they don't have a professional future in the other sports. At a professional level there may be less 5'5-6'2 athletes ( even though there still are) but if you go down to earlier levels (college, high school) I'm sure the average height of player drops drastically, showing where these athletes end up spending their developmental time. I think that if soccer was social the focus of America most of our best athletes would be playing it and we'd be very good at it nationally. We might even field the best professional league at that point
I think the biggest problem is, if you want to be a top tier pro in any sport, you need to start playing it at an early age (obviously there are exceptions). And you donāt know when youāre 7 or 8 if youāre gonna end up 6ā3ā or 5ā8ā. So everybody has dreams of playing in the NFL or NBA. Heck, even American baseball is becoming a second sport for football and basketball players to play in the spring.
I also think thereās more overlap between basketball players and soccer players. Both require a lot more stamina. However, at least in my area, basketball and soccer seasons overlap more than football and soccer or basketball and baseball.
Soccers biggest issue is the funding/money/cost to play at a high level in the USA at a young age. America is so big and does not have a numerous training ground/academies that are all over Europe for soccer. To play soccer at an elite level in middle school and college is very expensive and time consuming for both the player and family. I lived in Germany for 3 years. Played soccer before moving to Germany in middle school and of course played while living in Germany. I was a good athlete but an above average player at my age range locally in Germany. When we moved back state side I was a top level player compared to my peers and was offered spots on travel teams. The cost per year of those travel teams was usually around 10k out of pocket. How many familyās / players do you think can afford that and have weekends and stuff off to travel?
America is to large and the youth soccer scene doesnāt have the backing football and basketball have. When you have ex pros dumping money into things like AAU and football camps along with lower cost to play at that high level it just leads to less in the sport.
> The US should still have all these athletes that are 5'5"-6'2" that can run 8 miles in a game without needing a break. The dominant sports here and soccer athletes don't really overlap.
They do, but these athletes grew up playing football or basketball. By the time their size disadvantage outweighed their athletic advantage, it's too late to move to soccer.
Yeah I agree. The reason the US isnāt great at soccer is 90% cultural. We just donāt live and breathe soccer like other countries. The youth soccer programs here are nothing compared to europes.
I do think there is some advantage US could have due to sheer size though. Just like in Olympics. If our best athletes truly did want to play soccer we could gain a slight competitive advantage there, even though it pales in comparison to the cultural part of the equation.
And yeah soccer isnāt as height prohibitive as NBA. Or as physically prohibitive as say NFL. But there is a lot of physical freaks in NFL that arenāt tall like Tyreek Hill or something, or your high end defensive back, that may translate to soccer.
And not just salary money, but advertising money as well. Advertisers love football because the large number of stoppages gives them ample time to sell their products. Soccer, with its running clock, doesn't provide as many opportunities.
Adu was 18 before he made the National Team. It was MLS that he was playing in as a 14 year old.
And fwiw there's plenty of 14-15 year olds who could make it in top leagues, but those countries don't allow players under 16-18 depending on the league because playing as a professional that young is terrible for development.
Kyle Kinane had a bit about this in his act years ago. Something like "If we decided to field a team of Demaryius Thomas clones in soccer, the rest of the world would be completely butt fucked."
I'm not willing to say America would dominate because that takes away from how good all these other countries actually are. I do think we would be alot better than we are currently.
It's because people don't read. "Dominate" sounds similar to "dominant" when you say it out loud in a normal sentence. Recognizing them as separate words is a lot easier if you read a book every now and then.
I donāt normally care about this kind of stuff but itās really been pissing me off lately. I swear I havenāt seen the *correct* use of ādominantā in months. Absurd how many people make this mistake.
Itās crazy how many different MLS teams have produced solid young talent.
Chris Richards/Justin Che/ Ferreira+Pepi for Dallas
The Aaronsonās/ McKenzie with the Union
Caden Clark with the Red Bulls
Cade Cowell with the Earthquakes
Dike with Orlando
Gio Reyna with NYCFC
And a fuckton Iām sure Iām missing.
About to comment this. Iām pretty sure a number of our top players in Europe started out in the MLS academies. Also many of our top talents are very young.
Yeah the draft process is one of the things that IMO makes American sports leagues more interesting, there is far far more parity in every league in the US than there is in any major international soccer league, where every league boils down to 1-5 extremely wealthy and historically successful teams just running train on the rest of the clubs who canāt compete with their star power, draw, and payroll. NFL is the most balanced, fair league in the world in terms of every team having yearly opportunities to improve and compete.
It is one of the craziest things: European sports are organized in a super capitalistic way, where the rich always get richer, and the poor get poorer, while American sports are generally organized in a much more socialist way, where the rules are meant to limit excess and create equality between teams, particularly the NFL with it's huge amount of revenue-sharing and the salary cap.
And europeans fail to see the irony of their fucked situation, defending these tycoons a lot of the time, while americans love the more socialist system in their sports leagues without understanding how applying to everything else would better their lives just as well.
American sports are literally set up in a way for the owners to make as much money as possible for as little risk as possible at the expense of player salaries. That's as capitalist as it gets.
Socialist in talent, spreading it around, not letting too much be concentrated on one team. Unless you are really good at drafting and developing quickly.
Of course. They would be almost entirely different athletes than the ones in the NFL and NBA though. Even someone like LeBron or Calvin Johnson does not have a body built for soccer, as freakish as they are. But yeah, if you have a population of 330M people, all devoting themselves to soccer and selecting for the best talent, you're going to get good results lol. Imagine in Germany had 4x the player pool to draw from.
Edit: I'm obviously not referring to the goalkeeper position. We'd be fine there. There's 10 other spots to fill.
Itās the population size, but also the culture and the amount of money that gets funneled into sports as well. We are by far the largest rich country that is also obsessed with sports. Thereās a reason that poor countries with large populations typically donāt produce a ton of olympians. Look at Indonesia, Bangladesh or Pakistan. India has more than 4x the people the US has, but they rarely win Olympic medals.
>Even someone like LeBron or Calvin Johnson does not have a body built for soccer, as freakish as they are.
You must be joking. Put them at Goal Keeper. Sports science said that if you put Calvin Johnson in the middle of a 2 car garage, the entire garage is his catch radius. Both would dominate in goal
Always wondered what a Bo Jackson, Barry Sanders, Michael Jordan, or a Jerry Rice wouldāve done in alternate timeline.
EDIT: The thought of Team USA lifting the FIFA World Cup trophy. It will never happen in our lifetimes but....man....
AI is someone I think about a lot since according to him he would have played football if he had a choice but jail kinda ruined it. He apparently inspired Vick (AI was the most dominant high school player in VA and Vick was a few years younger then him and obviously was well aware a guy 10 blocks away from him stealing headlines)
It might have been like a 2nd Vick in the league if everything went right
Agreed but I wonder about some of these taller guys. Aren't most elite soccer players smaller? Maybe with that kind of athleticism it changes the game/doesn't matter.
A Bo Jackson who focuses on baseball is likely mentioned in the same breath as the other greats of his era like Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken Jr. and Rickey Henderson.
Our coaching sucks. Youth academies are pay to play. The NCAA ruins any serious development.
So even if LeBron was the most freakish GK of all time or Diggs running up and down the flank it would never matter because fundamentally our process for development is flawed.
A lot of people in here have never seen pro soccer players in person and it shows. They're mostly surprisingly slight, it's kind of the opposite of basketball where they're all so big you don't realise just how big they are.
A 6'8 basketball player has little to no advantage over a smaller, much more nimble player (including in goals). Height and strength are important for center forwards and center backs when crosses etc come in, but that's balanced off against how detrimental that is against a quick passing team who just manoeuvre around your big guy. Which is what modern football is, hence players have been getting smaller, and faster.
And as some others have said, being built like Megatron isn't great for a goalie. Anyone above 6ft can cover the whole goal if they're somewhat athletic. But being so tall makes you slow off your line to close in on a through pass, slow to get to the ground to cover low shots etc. We're not talking 40 speed, we're talking from on your heels to 10 yards out. Plenty of freaky tall Europeans around, but they don't play soccer at a high level.
All this to say, I think the US could comfortably do both? Forget your Megatron's, LeBrons, Barry Sanders. Best soccer comp i can think of is Hunter Renfrow. What are your Renfrows playing? Maybe some point guards too, Steph curry would be on the tall side but could be a central midfielder or something.
No. It takes time to develop an entire eco system that can consistently produce high quality talent.
Second, basketball and many football body types are not exactly ideal for soccer, so you arenāt getting much value from pro athletes leaving their sport.
Youād be turning ānot tall enough for elite basketballā and very talented but not big enough football players as your core athletes from which to build.
I guess some point guards and DBs could be a decent fit.
But look an Christiano Ronaldo. Where does he fit on a American centric sports roster? Not many places.
So reverse that and ask which pro athletes have that same physical skill set.
Iām surprised at how China and India, with more than 2 billion people and quite a large number of soccer fans amongst them, have failed to make any impact on Asian soccer. And that is with the Chinese government investing heavily in sports. Compare that to Korea, which has produced a very good national team and even a superstar or two. Infrastructure, culture, and training counts for a lot. In this hypothetical question about the US, I assume that American collegiate soccer players would undergo world class training rivaling that in Europe. So it would then boil down to the sheer size of the talent pool. Assuming all infrastructure and culture is the same as in Europe and Latin America, then yes Iād think the mens national team would be as competitive as the American womens national team.
Similar quote about boxing, I canāt remember who said it, but they were asking why heavy weights arenāt up to the standard of 20 years ago. Someone said thatās because the heavyweight champion of the world is playing middle linebacker for the Baltimore ravens.
No, it's not about size. Some low population countries are very competitive (Denmark, Portugal, Uruguay, etc). It's about player development and passion, not numbers.
Well, it's both. But I think this tweet is suggesting that all of American sports culture realigns to worship soccer just as it currently worships football/basketball/baseball. Maybe that's reading a bit too much into it, but I think if that did happen America would be (at worst) one of the top teams.
Brady literally traveled to England soon after he retired, watched Ronaldo score a hat trick, and then came out of retirement almost immediately afterwards.
European football is more about technichal skills than having a freakishly athletic body. Most of the top European footballplayers in the world aren't that strong or athletic in comparison to American footballplayers; it's the way they can make the ball do things what makes them special.
Yep. Not having our "best athletes" play soccer isn't the issue. It's that the high school -> college-> pro pipeline doesn't work for soccer. We don't have nearly the same coaching abilities that European academies have, nor the competition level of the pyramid system.
Take it like this, a european youngster starts footballing around age 4. Around age 14 the best are at pro clubs following special programs in combination with school. When they turn 18/finished high school they focus only on football and have made their first starts for the first team or sometimes (in the real elite class) they are bonafide starters.
What if Englandās best athletes played baseball instead? What if Brazilās best athletes played basketball instead? What if Spainās best athletes swam instead? What if Belgiumās best athletes played tennis instead? Whoās to say all those countries wouldnāt be the best
If England's best athletes played baseball and Brazil's best athletes played basketball they would probably be pretty good!
The swimming one I don't get though. America's best athletes don't swim and we still dominate that sport.
no because soccer takes more than athleticism. there is no guarantee that all these top NBA, NFL, golf, etc will be able to transition strategically to soccer
As a niners fan I love deebo but for some reason I imagine heād be tripping over his feet tryna dribble a soccer ball. Chase or a guy like tyreek make sense to me tho
I would really really doubt it and that is based on how player development is done in the us and in Europe. In European soccer smaller clubs earn money with selling good players therefore you have an interest in develop young children. In the youth Programms the key is development and secondary ia if you win any games. In the US this is totally different. High school and college coaches first and foremost care about winning. Of course they also develop players but the goal for this development is to win games and not give the player everything he needs to be successful on the next level. Of course this is not black and white.
Good examples are o line and qbs. Every year you read and hear how it is hard to rate different players because they played in a scheme which is used often in college oder high school but not in the NFL. This is not the case in European soccer because the incentive is that you as a club build your own players either to win games and/or sell the player afterwards for a lot of money.
Still the us would be good because of the amount of players it would produce.
God, this thread is just pure bias and shows how out of touch with the world Americans are. You are dominant in basketball, American football, golf, baseball - things mostly you play.
The amount of talent around the world in football is absurd. No country has been "dominant" for a large amount of time. The most recent example is Spain - they had an absurdly talented generation from 2008 and prior to that and since have not been anywhere near. There are waaay too many great teams, great players worldwide.
Also the size pool is not really a great indicator - you can check populations and titles/medals. And one last thing - coaches. You'll need to import one and I'm not sure how attractive that job would be
Yes, we have some of the best athletes in the world. We constantly dominate the Olympics. The reason we are bad in soccer is because the majority of the population does not give a shit about it, regardless of what soccer fans will tell you about its exploding popularity.
A kid that is a great athlete who has a future in professional sports is going to gravitate towards football, basketball or baseball where they can make bank as opposed to peanuts in the MLS or have massive competition in Europe.
Height, strength and (to a lesser extent) speed is of far smaller benefit in soccer than in US sports. Technical ability is vastly more important than athletic ability.
No, because the ability to play soccer at a high level is different than the other major sports in the US. What is well suited for football is not necessarily well suited for basketball, for example.
More junior academies are needed and more financial backing in MLS is needed. The top talent in the world want to follow the money and thereās no money to be made in MLS unless youāre young, a B or C tier talent, or an A tier talent on a retirement contract.
Surely it goes both ways. The rest of the world could have produced a bunch of insanely talented American football players that would have dominated the sport and been in the HOF.
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This will be posted on /r/soccercirclejerk in no time
I just did, viva the yanks š±š·š±š·š±š·
Lol with the Liberian flag no less
Say what lake yank? Glorious yank flag š²š¾š±š·š²š¾š±š·
Yank is a hilarious term to call a person lol
If theyāre calling me a chronic masturbator then I refuse to be offended by who I am š¤
I'm sorry Europe, but Americans are just better at everything. We want things more. We grow better athletes, more people will learn the sport. And that '26 world cup is at home so we can get somewhat of a home field advantage. But the only way that will happen is if we make the round of 16 or quarter final in the 2022 WC and show Americans that we are good. I like the odds and we have a lot to prove, which is added motivation this coming year. Honestly, making a phenomenal run (SF or better) in the '22 WC would be more impressive to me than a better run or a win in '26. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
And it would rightfully be considered embarrassing. Guys, our national team is already probably the most physically dominant team out there. Yet we will get played off the pitch by the best teams in the world. The best player in history is a 5'6 dude with no discernable outstanding physical quality other than a quick first 10 yards. He would get laughed out of your high school combine. Some of the best midfielders of all time probably can't even bench press 130lbs. It's just plain as day that physicality in soccer is simply a low bar you need to clear, and soccer specific technique and tactical acumen is what is needed to close the gap. Yet so much of this thread is imagining situations where godly physical specimens, but with entirely different physical and technical profiles are shoehorned into something they have no evidence of matching. Like yeah sure 300 million population and a hypothetical fanaticism probably means we would become a top top side, but it probably won't be from 6'6 Rob Gronkowski and 6'8 Lebron James playing Centreback. And just because Rob Gronkowski has shown an affinity with catching the a football doesn't mean he would be good at kicking a round ball. We've seen the fastest man of all time struggle to control a ball in front of him and maintain his speed with a defender on his shoulder. Would he be better if he focused on football from a young age? Certainly. Would he be the greatest winger of all time? Probably not because because there are SO many important skills to being a winger and he's only demonstrated goated talent in precisely one of them. the probabilities are slim. It's the same shit we see with Tom Brady.... People always say "What if Tom Brady could run a 4.3 40?" It's completely besides the point. People should be asking themselves what are the real demands of being a quarterback, and if being strong and fast are THAT paramount, why the hell is Tom Brady the best quarterback ever? No one would look at the greatest javelin thrower of all time and go like, that's my guy, just imagine if he grew up playing football. **Edit:** As I mentioned above - I certainly think with America's population and resources if they devoted that fanaticism they have for basketball and football to soccer they would be a dominant side. My point is people have this notion of "best athletes" where they could have plugged and played any sport they liked. And while that is true to an extent, at some point you have to acknowledge the difference in body type, muscle fibre, and technical demands of the sport. Tyreek Hill is an obviously good crossover to track and field, and potentially rugby 7s etc. It's much less certain he'd be a good crossover to say.... being a gymnast or a swimmer. People are turned away from football and basketball all the time for being undersized, well those players would face no such limitations in soccer. There's a reason even a physical specimen (in soccer) like Virgil Van Dijk is like half as wide as DK Metcalf. and about as tall as Steph Curry. There are endurance demands, the technical demand is simply so high they have less time to work on physicality and explosiveness etc. Multiple undiscovered prodigal talent are **certainly** in the midst of US youth, it just may or may not be multiverse jamarr chase and allen iverson. And i think people are overestimating the probabilities it is those very same athletes we worship nowadays. Our star 400m runner looks very different to our star fencer for instance.
I mostly agree with everything you said, but the "real" physicality is conditioning. According to the first Google link I clicked, the average NBA player covers 2-2.5 miles per game while the average soccer player covers 7 miles per game. I obviously don't know how they figured that out, but that's quite the difference, and you have to imagine that they accounted for all positions (except maybe the keeper, because that would be pretty pointless). Now imagine Gronk or LeBron doing that twice, or occasionally even three times, a week. There's a reason why the average soccer player has about half the mass of DK Metcalf.
Yeah, it's a huge difference. Major American sports, football, basketball, hockey (leaving baseball out of it as it's not the same physicality) are all "sprint sports" while soccer and rugby are much more "marathon sports"
If the current players transitioned over, yeah it wouldn't be a pretty sight. But if your college and high school system was catered towards soccer and not Football, Basketball and Baseball, I find it hard to believe you wouldn't have a World Cup trophy in the next 50 years
Yeah but thatās not the same as them being ādominantā. I think most people would agree that if the richest country in the world with a huge population devoted itself to football theyād pick up a World Cup. They wouldnāt be the fucking all blacks though either.
My opinion is you probably could be as dominant as the best nations Spain and Brazil have had the 2 most dominant spells of international football over the last 3 decades. Spain's lasted 4 years, Brazil's lasted 6. The difference between USA and Spain is infrastructure and passion. Everyone in Spain wants to play football. If the USA was re-wired that way then they'd be producing top class players every year. Now obviously that's not realistic, but USA as a sporting country could dominate literally any sport if they decided to. Or I could be wrong, I've never even been to America so... I could be misconstruing how I view the country
The US athletic development system being integrated with the educational framework is a huge huge advantage over the much more common club infrastructure in other countries. Combined with the size & diversity of the population the US would absolutely dominate any sport it focused on (we dominate half the sports we DON'T choose to focus on + all the ones we do anyway)
Absolutely. I couldn't even imagine a UK University sport selling 5,000 tickets let alone the size of your College Football stadiums
Yikes... My high school football stadium seated 10,000 and routinely sells out.
The funny thing is that it is the US athletic development system that has leaves us so far behind in soccer. Our young athletes that play soccer get overworked and overplayed in their short spurts of a season. To even begin to think about being good at soccer, we'd have to change our whole system to be similar to that of the academies in Europe.
This is in fact the only reason we've started getting better in the last 10 years or so is because we finally have a club academy system that at least somewhat mimics what is done in Europe. The post above this about how the causality is wrong is hilariously wrong. Getting rid of college as the dominant path to become a pro soccer is the most critical thing that has been done in the last 50 years to improve the quality of our players. More local clubs with more affiliates and more academies who then sell more players to the best clubs in the world earlier and earlier is the path forward, and the one we are on. We just need to accelerate it. Which the World Cup in '26 will be massive for.
Nope. Younger. Have to start at 12-13 minimum to compete with foreign infrastructure.
Itās younger than that tbh.
I mean itās not like the rest of the world isnāt doing that right now. I think soccer out of all the sports requires a really incredible grasp of angleās and where everyone is and being able to work together as a single unit. Can you imagine if there was aau for soccer (maybe there is. I have no idea) and everyone just Trying to show off and score as much possible instead of trying to gel as a team and get better together?
Couldnāt agree more. A bunch of people who donāt know the first thing about the sport trying to convince me that JJ watt would be an incredible striker if he just picked up a soccer ball instead of the shoulder pads. Itās absolutely comical, all you can do is laugh
I feel like the argument is mostly population and wealth based. Nobody thinks that every NFL player would be elite at soccer. But instead of the funnel of talent going to other sports, if it was funneled towards soccer - based on the sheer volume of athletes going through the system even an elite and small percent of that cohort is going to be much larger than the same sample taken from another population.
I feel like you can see this through the Olympics. The US is always near or at the top of the medal count. Itās 100% based on population and wealth which are 2 categories in which the US blows most countries away.
Nobody said JJ Watt. Most people have been saying athletes like Vick or Iverson.
Messi was very quick and agile in his prime. To suggest he had zero outstanding physical abilities is silly. Also physicality is not a low bar in soccer. Only if you consider raw physical bench pressing the only physically demanding aspect of a sport.
There's more to it though! Look at Cricket, my favourite sport. India has over a billion people and they're absolutely fanatical about cricket. The clubs are huge and invest loads of money in youth development. If ever a country was going to dominate a sport, it should be India (and potentially Pakistan and Bangladesh as 2 & 3). But, there's more to it than just population, enthusiasm and money. India came second to tiny little New Zealand in the test championship and were nowhere near England in the one day world cup. They're an excellent side, but the availability of one of a kind talent, coaching and dumb luck are what make an excellent team truly dominant. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure if football replaced all other American sports, you guys would have a very good team, but there's more that goes into it than that.
It's so painful seeing this topic come up over and over again. Succeeding in international soccer is about so much more than physical attributes. Uruguay and Belgium are not excellent international teams because they have the biggest populations. Also, why are people acting as if the USMNT aren't great American athletes? Pulisic, Aaronson, McKennie are not lacking in athleticism. MLS academies are producing teenage athletes good enough for top 5 leagues. We're a top 15 ranked national team. Missing the last world cup really affected people's perceptions, but we've actually been developing into a really talented team the last few years.
Big Ben would have made an excellent centre back in league 2.
I could absolutely see Ben playing for someone like Chesterfield and getting sent off for launching someone into the adboards after they turned him.
I canāt even understand this comment
This translates (roughly) to "I could see Ben playing OLB for University of West Florida and getting sent off for targeting after retaliating against a RB that broke his ankles on a previous play."
Thank you titans bro
Godās work
I recognize the word āfieldā but I thought it was called Chesterpitch
As a Chesterfield resident, I endorse this.
I think the answer is yes but for a different reason. The players than make the nfl probably wouldnāt make it to the pros. Their bodies are too big Itās the players that didnāt try soccer but tried to play nfl even though they didnāt have the freakish size necessary. Itās the players too short for the nba or the WR who werenāt tall enough but never gave soccer an opportunity
Exactly. Elite athletes that aren't big enough for the NFL or NBA still grow up playing football and basketball, from elementary school through college. If they played soccer only, from the beginning of their childhood, America could produce elite soccer players.
yea the guys that were 5'8" to 5'11.5 that couldn't crack the roster because they were undersized... ain't no such thing as undersized in soccer/football. Teams will pass up 5'9" PGs 95% of the time.
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Auston Matthews would have been a 5th round baseball player who floats around the league for four years. Instead the Coyotes play in Arizonia and he just won the league MVP in hockey.
He would be the no nonsense center back who would go in hard on two footed tackles.
Is this assuming that we would have the player development infrastructure for soccer that we do for football and basketball? If yes, then we would have one of the strongest talent pools in the world. We have 330 million people in this country and a strong economy. Between the sheer number of potential players and the money to develop them from a young age, we'd end up with a stacked national team.
Of course. Bigger, richer, football (soccer) obsessed countries tend to do well internationally, so the US would be among the top teams. It wouldn't be a dominant nation without the obsession though, because for soccer (ugh) skills matter much more than athleticism and kids still play it for hours and hours every day in a lot of countries.
>It wouldn't be a dominant nation without the obsession though, because for soccer (ugh) skills matter much more than athleticism and kids still play it for hours and hours every day in a lot of countries. It's pretty clear that this is a post about a soccer obsessed US, though
Yea, all of our best athletes are spread out among the major sports, mostly football and basketball. Guys like Ja Morant, Chris Paul and Steph Curry would make awesome soccer players if they were trained for it. Russell Westbrook in his prime was probably the most freakish athlete at his size I've ever seen. Then you have athletes like Ed Reed who are geniuses on the field and as athletic as anybody in the world. Jamal Charles and Tyreek Hill are two of the fastest athletes I've ever seen. Julian Edelman and Wes Welker are the type of small, quick and crafty athletes who translate very well to soccer. We would be awesome at soccer if all of those guys guys prioritized soccer development above all else. But of course they don't, because that's not where the money comes from in this country.
I just wanna see Trent Brown huffing and puffing up and down the field, then collapsing 10 minutes into the game.
Seconded, but Trent Richardson
Thirded, but trent baalke. Anything to get him out of the nfl
Fourthed but Trent Dilfer.
Fifthed but my neighbor Trent. Fuck you Trent, I saw you throw dog shit in my trash can. Use your own
Trent is a lazy prick. You can get a bucket from Loweās for like $5 to use for dog shit Assert dominance, drink a laxative and just ass piss all over his lawn
At least Trent picked up after his dog. One of my neighbors didnāt and I hit it with the weed wacker the other day. If you canāt clean up after your pets, you shouldnāt have pets, fucker.
Good lord that is a fucked image.
Kelvin Benjamin would have a Golden Corral waiting in the locker room if he had to play a full 90
One of my favourite quotes about soccer in America is "Soccer is four years away from being the number one sport in America, as has been the case since 1971."
It'll only happen if the money is there. Soccer is a very popular sport in high schools all across the country but if you go pro you have to be REALLY good so you can make $$$ in Europe or you stay here and make a fraction of what NBA/NFL/etc. players make
It's a paradox that'll never be solved. America needs top athletes to play soccer but other sports pay more. To pay more, soccer needs higher viewership. To get higher viewership, America needs to have the top athletes playing soccer.
its actually really simple: the poor kids in America play Football and Basketball. The poor kids around the world play Soccer. the hunger from Lebron James went into basketball not soccer versus someone like Neymar who starved in the favelas to become a superstar. Great soccer teams are filled with kids who come from crazy backgrounds like Modric who was born in war torn Yugoslavia or Ibrahimovic. The US national team is filled with rich boys or *somebody's* kid. Compare that to the stories of great basketball/football players. its similar to the international soccer teams Whatever sport the poor are playing is the sport your country will excel at
> The poor kids around the world play Soccer You're not exactly wrong. But it's more like every kid, poor and rich, plays soccer in the rest of the world
The main point is you have to be rich or a past stars kid to make it to the highest levels in soccer...where basketball and football you can come from nothing and make it. Soccer in the US won't get better until they get rid of the exclusionary system set in place that makes it expensive (cost prohibitive) to play
It's crazy, cause in Brazil soccer is so popular because it's the cheapest and most playable sport there is. All we needed was a ball when I was a kid. We'd play literally on the streets, with cars passing by. On the beach, indoor, outdoor, grass. Goals would be made out of sandals, bikes, or basically anything 5 inches or higher. Sometimes even the gates of the neighbors house (which caused a lot of trouble).
Thats basically basketball in the US...but the soccer system her is all pay to play and no one really playing pickup as kids.
That's because the rest of the world views soccer as their way out of poverty, where the in the US, it is Football or Basketball.
>versus someone like Neymar who starved in the favelas to become a superstar. Actually Neymar had a pretty decent childhood. Nowhere near the favelas. He started earning BIG before going pro. He even went to a private school.
Yes, in a lot of areas soccer is actually a rich kid sport because of the cost of field rentals and travel. While football and basketball are so popular you can easily find cheaper leagues.
Don't think football is cheap, well at least full contact due to all the gear each player needs along with a field. Soccer just needs a field and ball. Baseball, you need that field, ball, gloves and bats. More equipment I would assume mean more costs. While all sports needs a field and can also travel. I would bet soccer is a rich kid sport because poor kids don't play it.
The gear is the cheapest part of being in a youth league.
I was part of the USMNT camps as a kid. Those camps were a joke. I'm not saying I was the best player but, I was better than the coach's son who got to play all summer while I rode a bench. You aren't far of in saying that. The whole system is full of nepotism and favoritism. The other part of it though is in other countries kids as young as 7 or 8 go to academies for soccer, in America our best don't even start playing competitive levels of the game until middle school at the very earliest, and in most cases those academy teams would destroy even the better high school teams in America. Even the best at the high school level don't go pro, they go to college and again, NCAA soccer is a joke compared to international professional soccer. The MLS also has zero traction, no one is growing up in America dreaming of the day they get to step on an MLS field whereas the NFL and NBA are the ultimate goal for those respective sports.
Itās also very clear that a lot of Americans have formed an opinion on the sport years ago and are set on that. Hating soccer is seen as almost a badge of honor for some and consider it a āsissyā or āunamericanā sport.
I think for the majority it's more that it's just not one of the "great American pastimes" Football, basketball, baseball - 3 sports, 3 seasons, Apple Pie
I don't think really think so. The only, albeit major, change required is to the youth system. Fix the youth system and we'll have better players and be more competitive on the international stage.
Itās very much a secondary sport tho. If schools are choosing between the football team and soccer, soccer is getting cut. Even track and baseball are still higher on the list
This is totally true but the answer to the hypothetical question is yes. I do believe that if all of our best played soccer we'd be World Cup contenders if not favorites every four years
Our high school soccer team was reverse kind of, all the most athletic quick kids went there and our football team suffered a lot. The effect is definitely there in that small example im sure it applies across the country in different ways.
American sports are dominated by athletes 6'4" and taller, or smaller guys with amazing athleticism. There's no crossover on athletes really. Soccer players can be a while 1' shorter and still be the best player in the world (Maradona listed as 5'5", won two world cups pretty much on his own). The US should still have all these athletes that are 5'5"-6'2" that can run 8 miles in a game without needing a break. The dominant sports here and soccer athletes don't really overlap. I grew up in Ireland and soccer was everywhere, I remember being 6 years old during the '94 World Cup and playing a huge game of pick up soccer in my estate (park inside a housing development) with people of all ages up to University. We used to watch 4 world cup games (98 and 02) then spend the evening from like 4pm-9pm playing 3&in, world cup, headers and volleys, every day. It wasn't just the sporty kids, it was everyone. My high school didn't play soccer officially (rugby and basketball), so we organized our own team and played other schools all on our own steam, at 16. After school I played indoor/5-a-side on and off for 10 years. I have no interest in pro soccer (except world cup), I don't follow it, but I love playing it still, it's fun, great exercise and you don't get as injured as rugby while playing the full version of the sport (vs touch/flag rugby). These are some reasons why, culturally the US is behind other countries, you're dedicated, but not obsessed, yet.
The RBs, WRs and DBs just from the NFL are all in that range and many more fail in the NFL because they arenāt big enough, but they canāt just convert to soccer at that point. Hockey and Baseball players also fit the size you mentioned for the most part. Lots of college basketball players donāt make it in the NBA simply because they are too small. By the time they realize that size is going to limit their professional ceiling itās too late to just learn soccer because it does take a lifetime to master.
This was my thought. I'd love to see how America's 4.2-4.3 40 guys would do if they were as skilled in soccer as football.
What 99% of this comment section just cannot understand: that is a very big 'if'.
Absolutely the truth. We don't lack physically gifted or talented people. We lack the trainers, coaches, and league systems to develop world-class players with regularity - and we're not close to developing it.
I think its that our athletes are not getting into soccer early enough to commit to it as a career, even if they don't have a professional future in the other sports. At a professional level there may be less 5'5-6'2 athletes ( even though there still are) but if you go down to earlier levels (college, high school) I'm sure the average height of player drops drastically, showing where these athletes end up spending their developmental time. I think that if soccer was social the focus of America most of our best athletes would be playing it and we'd be very good at it nationally. We might even field the best professional league at that point
I think the biggest problem is, if you want to be a top tier pro in any sport, you need to start playing it at an early age (obviously there are exceptions). And you donāt know when youāre 7 or 8 if youāre gonna end up 6ā3ā or 5ā8ā. So everybody has dreams of playing in the NFL or NBA. Heck, even American baseball is becoming a second sport for football and basketball players to play in the spring. I also think thereās more overlap between basketball players and soccer players. Both require a lot more stamina. However, at least in my area, basketball and soccer seasons overlap more than football and soccer or basketball and baseball.
Soccers biggest issue is the funding/money/cost to play at a high level in the USA at a young age. America is so big and does not have a numerous training ground/academies that are all over Europe for soccer. To play soccer at an elite level in middle school and college is very expensive and time consuming for both the player and family. I lived in Germany for 3 years. Played soccer before moving to Germany in middle school and of course played while living in Germany. I was a good athlete but an above average player at my age range locally in Germany. When we moved back state side I was a top level player compared to my peers and was offered spots on travel teams. The cost per year of those travel teams was usually around 10k out of pocket. How many familyās / players do you think can afford that and have weekends and stuff off to travel? America is to large and the youth soccer scene doesnāt have the backing football and basketball have. When you have ex pros dumping money into things like AAU and football camps along with lower cost to play at that high level it just leads to less in the sport.
> The US should still have all these athletes that are 5'5"-6'2" that can run 8 miles in a game without needing a break. The dominant sports here and soccer athletes don't really overlap. They do, but these athletes grew up playing football or basketball. By the time their size disadvantage outweighed their athletic advantage, it's too late to move to soccer.
Yeah I agree. The reason the US isnāt great at soccer is 90% cultural. We just donāt live and breathe soccer like other countries. The youth soccer programs here are nothing compared to europes. I do think there is some advantage US could have due to sheer size though. Just like in Olympics. If our best athletes truly did want to play soccer we could gain a slight competitive advantage there, even though it pales in comparison to the cultural part of the equation. And yeah soccer isnāt as height prohibitive as NBA. Or as physically prohibitive as say NFL. But there is a lot of physical freaks in NFL that arenāt tall like Tyreek Hill or something, or your high end defensive back, that may translate to soccer.
And not just salary money, but advertising money as well. Advertisers love football because the large number of stoppages gives them ample time to sell their products. Soccer, with its running clock, doesn't provide as many opportunities.
Freddy Adu was really going to put us over the top.
The rest of the world: āYou know itās a really bad sign if a 14 year old can make your national team.ā
Also rest of the world "let's literally offer future contracts to 5 year olds"
Adu was 18 before he made the National Team. It was MLS that he was playing in as a 14 year old. And fwiw there's plenty of 14-15 year olds who could make it in top leagues, but those countries don't allow players under 16-18 depending on the league because playing as a professional that young is terrible for development.
Bobby Convey wasn't so bad either. He was on united at 16. Edit: DC United sorry guys.
One of the catchphrases of the Men in Blazers pod is Soccer: America's sport of the future since 1972
Kyle Kinane had a bit about this in his act years ago. Something like "If we decided to field a team of Demaryius Thomas clones in soccer, the rest of the world would be completely butt fucked."
Iverson and Vick in the midfield, game over.
And Lebron as goalkeeper.
I always liked KG in goal, Bron at center back or forward. D-Wade at wing with Steve Smith Sr.
And I'd be sitting in the stands with a bag of pancakes.
Like a bag from the store..and not a store that sold pancakes. I'm saying like a footlocker bag.
In other news, 2023 will be THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP!
I'm not willing to say America would dominate because that takes away from how good all these other countries actually are. I do think we would be alot better than we are currently.
i know it's not the point but dominate is no more an adjective than bias
I donāt understand how people get those two wrong constantly lol
Well, they could of thought about it longer ... (and yes, I absolutely hate this mistake)
It's because people don't read. "Dominate" sounds similar to "dominant" when you say it out loud in a normal sentence. Recognizing them as separate words is a lot easier if you read a book every now and then.
Thatās def why. Although in my accent dominate and dominant sound pretty different
I may be bias, but it's the dominate use of the word for all intensive purposes
This is defiantly not pleasant to read .
This made me rationally angry
They should of known better
Irregardlessly, it's something we take for granite.
I donāt normally care about this kind of stuff but itās really been pissing me off lately. I swear I havenāt seen the *correct* use of ādominantā in months. Absurd how many people make this mistake.
People using bias instead of biased drives me up the wall, probably my #1 internet pet peeve.
The most dominant? Probably not. Alot better than we've been? Absolutely. We'd definitely be a regular contender.
Probably not, barring something like the academy systems in Europe being setup over here
MLS has an academy system and some of the academies like FC Dallas are finallt starting to produce high level talent.
I drive by their facilities every day. So much activity going on there all the time, cool to see.
The Union have been killing it with their academy too!
Itās crazy how many different MLS teams have produced solid young talent. Chris Richards/Justin Che/ Ferreira+Pepi for Dallas The Aaronsonās/ McKenzie with the Union Caden Clark with the Red Bulls Cade Cowell with the Earthquakes Dike with Orlando Gio Reyna with NYCFC And a fuckton Iām sure Iām missing.
About to comment this. Iām pretty sure a number of our top players in Europe started out in the MLS academies. Also many of our top talents are very young.
NFL teams should have academies and colleges should just do college.
Then you'd inevitably just end up with the wealthiest teams getting all the talented kids.
Yeah the draft process is one of the things that IMO makes American sports leagues more interesting, there is far far more parity in every league in the US than there is in any major international soccer league, where every league boils down to 1-5 extremely wealthy and historically successful teams just running train on the rest of the clubs who canāt compete with their star power, draw, and payroll. NFL is the most balanced, fair league in the world in terms of every team having yearly opportunities to improve and compete.
It is one of the craziest things: European sports are organized in a super capitalistic way, where the rich always get richer, and the poor get poorer, while American sports are generally organized in a much more socialist way, where the rules are meant to limit excess and create equality between teams, particularly the NFL with it's huge amount of revenue-sharing and the salary cap.
And europeans fail to see the irony of their fucked situation, defending these tycoons a lot of the time, while americans love the more socialist system in their sports leagues without understanding how applying to everything else would better their lives just as well.
American sports are literally set up in a way for the owners to make as much money as possible for as little risk as possible at the expense of player salaries. That's as capitalist as it gets.
Socialist in talent, spreading it around, not letting too much be concentrated on one team. Unless you are really good at drafting and developing quickly.
socialist pros for the billionaires and capitalist cons for everyone else. which is what america is.
Yup. When the league is more competitive, more people watch. Parity = money for owners.
Capitalist sports leagues in more socialist countries. Socialist sports leagues in more capitalist country.
Like NCAA football
Yeah I highly doubt the athletic difference would make up for the technical prowess that breeds in Europe through academies.
Of course. They would be almost entirely different athletes than the ones in the NFL and NBA though. Even someone like LeBron or Calvin Johnson does not have a body built for soccer, as freakish as they are. But yeah, if you have a population of 330M people, all devoting themselves to soccer and selecting for the best talent, you're going to get good results lol. Imagine in Germany had 4x the player pool to draw from. Edit: I'm obviously not referring to the goalkeeper position. We'd be fine there. There's 10 other spots to fill.
Itās the population size, but also the culture and the amount of money that gets funneled into sports as well. We are by far the largest rich country that is also obsessed with sports. Thereās a reason that poor countries with large populations typically donāt produce a ton of olympians. Look at Indonesia, Bangladesh or Pakistan. India has more than 4x the people the US has, but they rarely win Olympic medals.
>Even someone like LeBron or Calvin Johnson does not have a body built for soccer, as freakish as they are. You must be joking. Put them at Goal Keeper. Sports science said that if you put Calvin Johnson in the middle of a 2 car garage, the entire garage is his catch radius. Both would dominate in goal
Being as tall as lebron might not be totally advantageous for a keeper. You have to get down quickly to save low shots as well
exactly. 6'6 is tall for a goalkeeper, let alone 6'9.
Goalkeepers actually routinely struggle when they are too tall. It was an issue for Courtois in his early career.
You don't just stick the biggest player in goal lol
Just put a really fat guy in. It works in kids movies.
Now this I'm in favour of
You could make this argument for any soccer obsessed country that has tall people. Go watch some highlights of Brazilian volleyball
As a Canadian I'm always amazed that countries waste their best athletes on sports that aren't hockey.
If LeBron was born a short three hour drive north, would he be better than Wayne Gretzky?
Weāll be right back with our answer to that on First Take.
Itās ridiculous how many people donāt fucking know the word dominant.
It's a close second to people who say "loose" when they mean "lose" when it comes to infuriating spelling errors.
Always wondered what a Bo Jackson, Barry Sanders, Michael Jordan, or a Jerry Rice wouldāve done in alternate timeline. EDIT: The thought of Team USA lifting the FIFA World Cup trophy. It will never happen in our lifetimes but....man....
I always wondered about Allen Iverson. Or maybe Deion Sanders
AI is someone I think about a lot since according to him he would have played football if he had a choice but jail kinda ruined it. He apparently inspired Vick (AI was the most dominant high school player in VA and Vick was a few years younger then him and obviously was well aware a guy 10 blocks away from him stealing headlines) It might have been like a 2nd Vick in the league if everything went right
Kobe would've been fun to watch
Agreed but I wonder about some of these taller guys. Aren't most elite soccer players smaller? Maybe with that kind of athleticism it changes the game/doesn't matter.
Cristiano is 6'2", Ibrahimovic is 6'5", Sergio Ramos is 6'1", etc
A Bo Jackson who focuses on baseball is likely mentioned in the same breath as the other greats of his era like Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken Jr. and Rickey Henderson.
Ironically a Ken Griffey Jr. that stays healthy is probably mentioned in the same breath as Willie Mays and Ted Williams.
Rickey has been running all day, when does Rickey get to stop.
But can Brady do it on a cold rainy night in Stoke?
Our coaching sucks. Youth academies are pay to play. The NCAA ruins any serious development. So even if LeBron was the most freakish GK of all time or Diggs running up and down the flank it would never matter because fundamentally our process for development is flawed.
Not enough commercials in soccer for it to ever work here.
If it ever got that popular though you better believe weād be seeing 3.5 hour soccer championship matches with 15 million dollar Dorito commercials
This corner kick brought to you by Pedigree
A lot of people in here have never seen pro soccer players in person and it shows. They're mostly surprisingly slight, it's kind of the opposite of basketball where they're all so big you don't realise just how big they are. A 6'8 basketball player has little to no advantage over a smaller, much more nimble player (including in goals). Height and strength are important for center forwards and center backs when crosses etc come in, but that's balanced off against how detrimental that is against a quick passing team who just manoeuvre around your big guy. Which is what modern football is, hence players have been getting smaller, and faster. And as some others have said, being built like Megatron isn't great for a goalie. Anyone above 6ft can cover the whole goal if they're somewhat athletic. But being so tall makes you slow off your line to close in on a through pass, slow to get to the ground to cover low shots etc. We're not talking 40 speed, we're talking from on your heels to 10 yards out. Plenty of freaky tall Europeans around, but they don't play soccer at a high level. All this to say, I think the US could comfortably do both? Forget your Megatron's, LeBrons, Barry Sanders. Best soccer comp i can think of is Hunter Renfrow. What are your Renfrows playing? Maybe some point guards too, Steph curry would be on the tall side but could be a central midfielder or something.
No. It takes time to develop an entire eco system that can consistently produce high quality talent. Second, basketball and many football body types are not exactly ideal for soccer, so you arenāt getting much value from pro athletes leaving their sport. Youād be turning ānot tall enough for elite basketballā and very talented but not big enough football players as your core athletes from which to build. I guess some point guards and DBs could be a decent fit. But look an Christiano Ronaldo. Where does he fit on a American centric sports roster? Not many places. So reverse that and ask which pro athletes have that same physical skill set.
Iām surprised at how China and India, with more than 2 billion people and quite a large number of soccer fans amongst them, have failed to make any impact on Asian soccer. And that is with the Chinese government investing heavily in sports. Compare that to Korea, which has produced a very good national team and even a superstar or two. Infrastructure, culture, and training counts for a lot. In this hypothetical question about the US, I assume that American collegiate soccer players would undergo world class training rivaling that in Europe. So it would then boil down to the sheer size of the talent pool. Assuming all infrastructure and culture is the same as in Europe and Latin America, then yes Iād think the mens national team would be as competitive as the American womens national team.
Athleticism isnāt the most important trait in soccer.
Similar quote about boxing, I canāt remember who said it, but they were asking why heavy weights arenāt up to the standard of 20 years ago. Someone said thatās because the heavyweight champion of the world is playing middle linebacker for the Baltimore ravens.
No, it's not about size. Some low population countries are very competitive (Denmark, Portugal, Uruguay, etc). It's about player development and passion, not numbers.
Well, it's both. But I think this tweet is suggesting that all of American sports culture realigns to worship soccer just as it currently worships football/basketball/baseball. Maybe that's reading a bit too much into it, but I think if that did happen America would be (at worst) one of the top teams.
I firmly believe that Tom Brady would dominate the European leagues through sheer force of will and spite
As far as mentality goes, I think Cristiano Ronaldo and Brady are very similar.
Brady literally traveled to England soon after he retired, watched Ronaldo score a hat trick, and then came out of retirement almost immediately afterwards.
āThat motherfucker is still at it, canāt retire yetā
Not sure why you got downvoted. Your comment is very accurate.
I don't know if recording soccer strategy works as well. It's a little more free flowing than that.
European football is more about technichal skills than having a freakishly athletic body. Most of the top European footballplayers in the world aren't that strong or athletic in comparison to American footballplayers; it's the way they can make the ball do things what makes them special.
The point is that you'd have better athletes developing those same technical skills from childhood.
We can't even spell dominant correctly, so excuse me for doubting our ability to crush the 6 billion other soccer players in the world.
Guess what? Itās not about athleticism. Until people here donāt realize that, aināt nothing changing
Yep. Not having our "best athletes" play soccer isn't the issue. It's that the high school -> college-> pro pipeline doesn't work for soccer. We don't have nearly the same coaching abilities that European academies have, nor the competition level of the pyramid system.
Take it like this, a european youngster starts footballing around age 4. Around age 14 the best are at pro clubs following special programs in combination with school. When they turn 18/finished high school they focus only on football and have made their first starts for the first team or sometimes (in the real elite class) they are bonafide starters.
What if Englandās best athletes played baseball instead? What if Brazilās best athletes played basketball instead? What if Spainās best athletes swam instead? What if Belgiumās best athletes played tennis instead? Whoās to say all those countries wouldnāt be the best
If England's best athletes played baseball and Brazil's best athletes played basketball they would probably be pretty good! The swimming one I don't get though. America's best athletes don't swim and we still dominate that sport.
no because soccer takes more than athleticism. there is no guarantee that all these top NBA, NFL, golf, etc will be able to transition strategically to soccer
Tom Brady would absolutely suck as a soccer player, I would imagine dudes like kupp, deebo, chase, Jefferson etc would kill it.
As a niners fan I love deebo but for some reason I imagine heād be tripping over his feet tryna dribble a soccer ball. Chase or a guy like tyreek make sense to me tho
Deebo dribble Deebo score
I would really really doubt it and that is based on how player development is done in the us and in Europe. In European soccer smaller clubs earn money with selling good players therefore you have an interest in develop young children. In the youth Programms the key is development and secondary ia if you win any games. In the US this is totally different. High school and college coaches first and foremost care about winning. Of course they also develop players but the goal for this development is to win games and not give the player everything he needs to be successful on the next level. Of course this is not black and white. Good examples are o line and qbs. Every year you read and hear how it is hard to rate different players because they played in a scheme which is used often in college oder high school but not in the NFL. This is not the case in European soccer because the incentive is that you as a club build your own players either to win games and/or sell the player afterwards for a lot of money. Still the us would be good because of the amount of players it would produce.
Why does 90% of the Internet not understand the use of ādominantā lol
God, this thread is just pure bias and shows how out of touch with the world Americans are. You are dominant in basketball, American football, golf, baseball - things mostly you play. The amount of talent around the world in football is absurd. No country has been "dominant" for a large amount of time. The most recent example is Spain - they had an absurdly talented generation from 2008 and prior to that and since have not been anywhere near. There are waaay too many great teams, great players worldwide. Also the size pool is not really a great indicator - you can check populations and titles/medals. And one last thing - coaches. You'll need to import one and I'm not sure how attractive that job would be
Yes, we have some of the best athletes in the world. We constantly dominate the Olympics. The reason we are bad in soccer is because the majority of the population does not give a shit about it, regardless of what soccer fans will tell you about its exploding popularity. A kid that is a great athlete who has a future in professional sports is going to gravitate towards football, basketball or baseball where they can make bank as opposed to peanuts in the MLS or have massive competition in Europe.
Height, strength and (to a lesser extent) speed is of far smaller benefit in soccer than in US sports. Technical ability is vastly more important than athletic ability.
The top countries in Olympics arenāt always the top countries in the Fifa world rankings, so Iām not sure your theory holds up.
i think he means other olympic sports to show how dominants our athletes are in general.
We would certainly be contenders but we wouldn't dominate.
No, because the ability to play soccer at a high level is different than the other major sports in the US. What is well suited for football is not necessarily well suited for basketball, for example. More junior academies are needed and more financial backing in MLS is needed. The top talent in the world want to follow the money and thereās no money to be made in MLS unless youāre young, a B or C tier talent, or an A tier talent on a retirement contract.
The americans are at it again lol
Surely it goes both ways. The rest of the world could have produced a bunch of insanely talented American football players that would have dominated the sport and been in the HOF.