OT: What if the best US althletes played soccer?

[Burnsbros23]

I also think Neymar would be a pretty good basketball player. If ronaldo grew up in america he would prolly be a good football player.

 

[Gurleyman]

Why do you think that just because Iverson is quick on a basketball court that he could have ever learned how to kick a soccer ball with the precision of Donovan (who would frankly not be very far behind Iverson if they sprinted the length of a soccer field). Just because you can do something with your hands in a condensed space, doesn't mean you'd be able to translate those skills to your feet in wide open spaces. Does Iverson even have the flexibility in his hips to generate the foot speed to cross a ball to the far post? He might not - I've seen tremendous basketball players with zero arm speed in baseball/softball.

Donovan has incredible soccer instincts and field vision, and can cross the ball with either foot on a dime, but there is no guarantee he ever would have ever had the same dexterity throwing a football, no matter how much he tried to practice. So even though he has some of the things (vision, athleticism) you need to be a successful quarterback, there's no way to know if it ever would have worked. Athletic skills don't automatically translate no matter what you do. It's a total insult to Donovan to tell him that any good athlete could be trained to do what he does.

A graph showing how tall regular people are is useless. Elite athletes are not regular people - they are the best of the best, weeded out through a basic Darwinist type system. If being 6-4 or over was consistently advantageous in soccer, there would be a lot more of them playing elite level - the same way there are a lot more people that tall playing basketball and volleyball. But in 150 years of soccer, nobody has ever dominated with size. The taller players are, the worse they usually are with their feet, and the ball is on the ground most of the time. The occasional header has never been valuable enough to put someone tall out there who can't do anything else. There are the very occasional Peter Crouch types who have some success at 6-7, but they're rare and they don't revolutionize the sport (i.e. nobody has said "we need a 6-6 defender to guard him"). And given that it's the most popular sport in the world and every country (except us) filters the best they have into it from the youth system on, if it helped to be taller, we'd see more examples. In fact, the best soccer players in the world have never been overwhelming athletic specimens - in size, strength or speed. They've all been athletic enough, but mostly they've had a special gift for the sport. Throwing Iverson a soccer ball doesn't mean you're getting a more athletic Messi.

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[Burnsbros23]

I agree who knows if Iverson would be a star but if our best athletes played soccer we would be better. You cant argue that.

And Allen Iverson is a lot quicker than Landon Donnovan.

 

[willinphilly]

No, probably not, and no.

are you serious? that's an absurd example. messi is 5'5". of course he wouldn't be a top point guard. but that's not a slight against his athleticism, just his size. neymar is 5'8" and 130 pounds. extraordinary athlete just not big. these guys are top-flight athletes, soccer requires a different type of athleticism than basketball.

 

[willinphilly]

Simple physics?
More like, if you look at a normal distribution of human height, you get a graph that looks like this:

6'4" is 76". You can see by inspection that only a 1% or so of men fall in that range (in North America).
I'd guess South America has even less, as does Italy and Spain.
So, by pure % of the population, you'd expect very few soccer players to be over 6/4.
Throw in that, at least in white populations, men over 6/4 tend to be ungainly, and you are not going to see a lot of soccer players over 6/4 coming out of europe.
But it's got nothing to do with physics.
You take your average NBA athlete and start him at age 3 playing soccer, he'll be better than your typical 5/8 guy, because he'll be bigger, faster, and stronger, with at least the same dexterity.

This is simple statistics - the number of South American and European kids playing soccer who are 5/6-6/0 outnumber 6/4 and up players by about 200 to 1, if not more. It is, therefore, no surprise to see that most successful players are relatively short.

Have no doubt - if a 6/6 athletic guy grew up on soccer like Maradonna did, he would have a huge physical advantage over a 5/8 shorty with the same background.

Not really following here. In your line of argument, shouldn't NBA players mirror the average height of the population then? As Gurleyman pointed out, there's not a huge advantage in being tall in soccer. Having a lower center of gravity which allows you to accelerate quickly and weave in and out of areas is valued higher than pure height. Of course if a 6'6" guy could move with the same dexterity as Maradona or Messi could then you could make your argument, but it doesn't happen.

 

[Gurleyman]

Yeah, you're right. Iverson is quicker - my point was open field speed, but there certainly are explosive fast-twitch muscle fibers (or whatever you call em) that make Iverson an elite athlete moreso than Donovan. Iverson was able to harness that in basketball by also having the hand-eye coordination to flip a basketball into the net while contorting himself in midair (and also developed the ability to shoot the long-range shots against collapsing defenses). That separated him from the Covington Cormiers of the world.

In soccer, he would have needed to harness his quickness much differently, and there's no way to know if he would have developed the specific skills with his feet that he would have needed, no matter how much he practiced. He might have been the Cov Cormier of soccer - really fast, but with a tendency to dribble the ball out of bounds a lot. I'm sure he could have succeeded in college just based on athleticism, but elite soccer defenders are too good - if they aren't worried about your ball-striking, it doesn't matter how athletic you are, they'll funnel you where they want you to go, and shut you down.

I think it's definitely true we'd be better at soccer if it was a bigger part of the culture. With 300,000,000 people (and a lot of great athletes), odds are very good that several US athletes have had the potential to be elite level international soccer players who never even started playing the sport. In pretty much every other country, if anyone had it in them, they found that talent early on and cultivated it. The cultural differences do make a big difference - poor Brazilian kids dribble soccer balls down gravel streets to go play pick-up games. American kids who play soccer usually pile out of their SUV's with a ball under their arm. Likewise, basketball in our country is played on every patch of blacktop in every city - internationally, players were always developed in skill camps (although it is more popular now in urban areas).

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