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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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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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