Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
natesilver.netI don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking.
I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries.
In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many boys are playing once or twice every day, in an unstructured format, during recess and after school.
Starting from a young age, Europeans who show talent are getting drafted into soccer academies before they're 10, greatly increasing the amount of competitive play. But this is on top of the everyday soccer they're playing.
For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." A local league costs money. A private high school with a good program costs money. In Europe, beyond (again) the continuous unstructured play, the academies and farm teams are free.
Finally, a good European player doesn't usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18.
Meanwhile, a gifted US soccer player heads to college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season, and four years later might get on one of the relatively few club teams.
Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc. And often enough adults join in because they were once the kids too.
So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly.
One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol.
Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference.
Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.
The counterpoint to this is that, broadly speaking, Mexico is demonstrably no better at soccer than the US when it matters. A common talking point in recent years is that the US league is actually better at developing Mexican talent than the Mexican league, though that somewhat reflects different incentives.
I think a core issue is that US and Mexican teams rarely have an opportunity to compete against teams significantly better than themselves. Furthermore, structural constraints within both leagues limit the amount of talent separation that can occur between teams, so it looks a bit like being stuck in a local minima in terms of talent development.
Mexico performs as you'll expect a third world country that loves football to perform, and the US performs as well as you would expect a first world country that is ambivalent to football to perform.
I think the real mystery is, how come Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay play so much better than what you would expect from relatively poor countries?
My guess is that their leagues are fairly developed industries, like you would expect in the first world.
> My guess is that their leagues are fairly developed industries, like you would expect in the first world.
Pretty much, like in Europe, if you have any interest/talent in football, you enroll in your local club as a kid and go on from there, in Argentina you have a multitude of leagues until you reach Primera Division, so you have from 5 to 6 levels of competition in between organized directly by the Argentine Football Association, founded in 1891, also ran the first tournament in that same year, which makes it the oldest associated football league other than the British FA cup (1871).
Below that you have the regional/provincial leagues, the least populated province, Tierra del Fuego, has 2; Buenos Aires province has 70+ by itself.
We play football every time in Argentina, not to say in Brazil
Football in Brazil has history, legacy, and mind share. I can name several professional teams from Brazil - Flamenco, Corinthians, Santos, etc. I also know of River Plate, Rosario and Boca Juniors from Argentina. This points to the fact that Brazilian and Argentine teams are older than the Mexican teams.
I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s. The oldest Brazilian and Argentina clubs date back to the 1900s.
> I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s.
Teams like Atlante and América were founded in 1916.
The Mexican Primera favors a unique type of athlete…players who can regularly play at 10,000 feet (3000m) because many matches are played in and around Mexico City. And other clubs are also above 5000 feet.
Add in daytime heat, night cold, humidity and smog and you get a very different practical reality that shapes the pace and tactics of the Primeria and soccer culture in general. In turn that shapes who succeeds as a soccer playing athlete.
This is an interesting theory. But do Mexican soccer players do much better at home games?
Not clear what you are asking, but at the international level Azteca is notoriously advantageous…of course top European sides never visit so there’s no general empirical data.
And you won’t get much more from the world cup because the only ceded European side favored to play at Azteca is England in the round of 8.
A ball? When I was a kid we rolled a bunch of socks together and played with it in the middle of the street and we defined the goal area with a pair of flip flops.
No need of a ball and infrastructure when you really want to play
Rolling a bunch of socks together is.. a ball? Right?
Cricket is even more accessible: you need a bat (which could be a piece of wood), but you don't need space. You can compress the game to play in a 1.5m wide alleyway between two buildings.
I think this is why it became so popular in India etc.
Soccer is still more accessible. You don't even need a ball. As a kid, you'll find yourself kicking around a crushed coke can with friends and trying to score.
Depends on location. Cricket requires a ball that bounces. Football, you can play with a wad of left-over paper tied together with tape or strings.
Cricket puts restrictions on the pitch (ground must be fairly hard and even where the ball bounces) that are easily met in typically dry India but harder to meet in wet England, where they need to nurture/torture grass to get the right conditions (growing it to get long, strongly interleaving roots, but then drying out the ground and cutting the grass very short to not make the bouncing ball slip)
Cricket also does not require a lot of running and because the defense controls the ball, it fills a lot of time at a slow pace.
Like Baseball, a Sunday afternoon game has a low risk of an injury that prevents work on Monday.
My mate broke someone's arm bowling at him. Cricket always has an element of danger, for both the fielders and the batters.
Getting hit in the face/neck by a cricket ball moving at 150mph can cause serious injuries, even death.
For example
Minor nit: Fastest ever recorded ball bowled was 100 mph. I believe you were thinking 150 kmph.
Also, if we're talking about street/amateur cricket, or even higher-level cricket a couple of levels removed from international, you are rarely going to have rockets hurled at you. Most will be 120 kmph tops.
there is also a ton of grass-roots football in India, with kids kicking a ball around wherever there is a space for it. that doesn't translate to having good national teams simply because there is not much funding to develop the game, unlike with cricket.
>she was immersed in it
The other part is not only do these kids spend more time on these sports depending on culture or norm but also the players they are playing against.
The same is with Basketball in US, Table Tennis in Taiwan and Football in Europe. You are likely playing against people who are much just so much better at the sport compared to other countries with different norm. You are basically training with better people. And this pushes the quality of players even higher.
I thought the concrete ground is much more important for basketball, otherwise the ball would bounce all over the place. In comparison, muddy ground for soccer is part of the fun.
> Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc.
The same is true in Argentina. And in school kids play almost every recess too.
A lot of very prominent player from Argentina had this kind of humble beginning too.
It’s also “the sport”. Americans don’t really do casual sports anymore and there is a ton of competition in the various leagues.
In many parts of the US, soccer is a fall sport that competes with football in school leagues. Football teams require a small army of players and tend to suck out the oxygen. It doesn’t help that there’s no little league equivalent for soccer, so there’s a ton of pay to play BS to a much greater degree than football or baseball.
In my area, you need to commit to a full year travel soccer team that’s often owned by the school coach to get any playtime in high school.
USAmericans casually play basketball still. Basically a few kids shooting hoops at every little court you pass, and lightly organized (just show up at a time) adult games are common too.
I played soccer during recess at school. I was inept at it. I was terrible at football, too. I really stunk at basketball. Berry berry bad at baseball. Sank at swimming.
I'm from Honduras, which is also quite a poor country, and the sport (soccer) is all we do and all everyone talks about. It's a core part of our society and a core part just what one does as a human, so since we are kids we think of always kicking a ball around no matter where you are, even fashioning balls from socks tied together or rubber bands, and we all learn how to control them really well even barefoot, in difficult terrain, in rain, sun, shine, anything. It isn't a structured activity. Coming to the US I realized so many American sports need a ton of setup...lots of expensive equipment, a full squad, a special field (baseball), etc. and not just something you can do easily on the street with your friends. It isn't "lived and breathed" as it is where I'm from, and we have so many incredible players. Unfortunately, we are a poor country so the best players won't become professionals and instead pursue other careers, so our national team isn't great, but I know guys that could easily be pros in Europe if they went down that path
In the US we had the same but for pickup American football. We played on the street in the neighborhood every night, and had standing games at a kind centralized empty field on Sat/Sunday where everyone know to just show up and there'd be a game, or after it rained (mud football). Only equipment was a football or a nerf football. Kids are kids :)
> We played on the street in the neighborhood every night
Street light to utility box
I think you are overlooking the more obvious answer. All the talent gets sucked up by the nfl/nba/mlb.
I think you're probably underestimating just how much time kids in other places spend playing football in their spare time. When I was a kid, we were out 2-3 hours every night after school playing it.
IIRC, Steve Nash wanted to play professional soccer but since there wasn't a professional pathway had to settle for playing basketball in college and later the NBA.
Why not both?
And sprinkle in some cultural differences (soccer is not that popular in the USA, so it's self-reinforcing).
Well, nfl/nba are focused on big guys, 6’3 and above. In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap. And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all.
Lotta roles for fast smaller guys in NFL and MLB, so there's certainly competition.
Beaten-to-death takes about baseball and athleticism aside, if a kid shows potential there it's a great path to follow:
- some of the highest individual salaries and (to date) least restrictions on team spending
- it's very very very easy for individual talent to stand out at basically every position; this can be harder in football and various levels especially for non-QB positions
But once you're on the baseball path you're not gonna be training a skillset that would have much overlap with a soccer skillset.
> In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap.
This is untrue and also just silly. The talent pools for horse jockeys and NBA players don't overlap. The talent pool for soccer and football is probably 90% overlap. Smaller players are certainly more likely to be successful in soccer than football but tall players can do great in soccer and average height guys can do well in football.
> And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all.
Come on. Baseball doesn't demand the same athleticism as soccer but these guys are still elite athletes and there are plenty of stories of both MLB and NFL offering positions to the same players.
Taller players do great in soccer, to a point. I mean, goalkeepers are the tallest, typically, about 6'4, 6'5. For field players, they usually max out around 6'3, but that's only for certain specialized positions like a striker, or central defender. Above that and you are too big and too slow, smaller players will quite literally run circles around you. I think overall average height of soccer player is below 6 feet.
Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time is only 5'7 - that should tell you something.
> Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time is only 5'7 - that should tell you something.
One data point doesn’t tell me anything. Cristiano Ronaldo, also frequently in the “GOAT” conversation is 6’2”.
On Argentina’s national team, literally no one is shorter than Messi. 17 of the players (20 with keepers) are taller than the Argentinian average male height with only 6 below.
> they usually max out around 6'3, but that's only for certain specialized positions like a striker, or central defender
Specialized positions like “all of them”. There are literally no positions in soccer where it is advantageous to be short. There are simply positions where it is less of a disadvantage.
> Above that and you are too big and too slow, smaller players will quite literally run circles around you.
I’m the same height as Messi so I would love to believe that there is some athletic advantage to being short, but it’s just not true. Messi is outstanding in spite of his height, not because of it.
Short people are not faster than tall people, not even very tall people. Maybe in the extreme outliers this is true, but Usain Bolt is 6’5”.
As you indicate the most popular (and generally highest paying) professional sports in the US are football, basketball and baseball.
This includes college football and basketball, which are part of the career path for those sports.
Women's soccer is relatively popular, however.
> Women's soccer is relatively popular, however.
This may be a function of the fact that no other women's team sport is at all popular in the US?
Womens basketball viewership across college, pro and semi pro levels is significantly more popular than equivalent womens soccer levels. Non-USWNT games are surprisingly hard to locate and stream.
The WNBA would like a word.
The average NFL CB is the same size as a striker, but quicker and faster. And it isn't even all that close. Its the living and breathing soccer that matters. In those places, the best athletes play soccer. In the US, they play football or basketball. And if you think you can do anything at a pro level without extreme levels of athleticism, you are greatly deluded.
The amount of distance covered in a soccer game is twice that of a cornerback in an NFL game. Unlike NFL, soccer also has very limited substitutions so you can't readily swap in fresh legs. An athlete needs to be able to go the full distance at a high level.
A natural cornerback isn't going to be "quicker and faster" over that many miles without a different kind of conditioning that probably favors different genetics. That said, I do think the game would translate well for some cornerbacks in some roles.
Additionally, a top-division European soccer team also typically plays something like 34 or 38 league games every season, and that doesn’t include things like domestic cups and European competition.
Excellent point. I hadn’t even considered the number of games. Good players will play over 2500 minutes in a season. That is a completely different type of wear and tear.
> Finally, a good European player doesn't necessarily head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 18 or 19.
My guess is that less than 5% of european soccer players ever set a foot in College, at least in the biggest Leagues (UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany). I only know two: Lampard and Iniesta. There might be a few more, but they are oddities.
If anything, a good player and good student usually has to make a choice at 18 years old: "am I good enough to bet my future on being a pro player and delay/abandon the College, or do I give up on being pro and focus on studying?"
The most important factor however is that many EU countries don't have a US-style college system. E.g. in Germany we have a very different schooling system and a very different job education system. Even the university system is quite a bit different to the US-style.
Some jobs (e.g. bookkeeper) here are apprenticeships where in the US you'd go to some community college.
So there might be european soccer players around that don't have a "college" but still have learned a job from the basics.
That said: a german source says that only 19.6% of the soccer stars (Bundesliga) have learned a common job.
Oh, and another thing: that only 19.6% "already" have one isn't that much concerning. It is actually quite common that people do a job education (or 2nd job education) at an older age.
Examples: you learnt to a nurse (which isn't college here), but the stress is too much. So at age 30 you learn something else, e.g. carpentry or backoffice things.
So that someone that learned soccer learns something else, e.g. insurance agent, at age 30 would be totally normal and socially acceptable over here.
Try joining a serious club between 12 to 14. Most soccer players that turn pro left school years ago. Sports and education aren't linked outside of the US.
The US sports system is especially structured around colleges; while you get named city teams in American football and basketball, there doesn't seem to be anything like the European system where there are often multiple city teams, teams with "works" origins, and generally the legacy of the big early 1900s working class soccer boom. Which was organic/grassroots around self-organized clubs.
In fact, class plays a big role: soccer used to be "too working class" for British university goers, who play rugby (named after the elite school!) or more esoteric stuff like Oxbridge rowing.
If you have a choice (an offer) to be a pro player at 18, it means you had already given up on school by 12 or younger.
Most soccer players tend to retire in their late 30s so they are better off pursuing an education after their pro athlete career. Of course the best are multi millionaires who never have to work and can live from passive income.
Not necessarily true, there are lots of careers where have been a professional footballer is the qualification in and of itself without having anything to do with football. E.g. sales, sufficient people find talking to an ex-footballer impressive enough to open doors that getting a job in sales is easy.
And of course there's always the coaching/management path.
The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).
Soccer has major competition in the US.
Because these sports started in America too, America usually dominates them.
> The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).
It appears the sports industry in US skewed local preferences toward hardware-intensive sports, that sell lots of gear. Poor children can start playing soccer stuffing crumpled paper in plastic bags to create a makeshift ball, and using spaced sandals as makeshift goalposts. Minimal hardware requirements. It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera. Basketball comes closer to soccer in this regard.
>It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera
In practice, casual football isn't any more resource heavy than soccer. Most non-league games of football are going to be "touch football", which only requires a ball, a field, and some sort of end marker (as a kid, it was usually just "from that tree to that other tree").
Obviously, organized league play has a ton more equipment, but the sort of informal casual games that kids or young adults play requires much less. It's one of those things that doesn't really get talked about a ton compared to league play, so it's easy to miss for those who didn't grow up with it.
A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat if you're hitting a light enough ball. It you can scrounge up a tennis ball, they work pretty well for street baseball. Don't need gloves, bases can be whatever you can agree on. Of course, it you have something vaguely soccerball shaped, you can play kickball with improvised bases rather than playing soccer.
>A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat
Right around the 80’s and 90’s the idea of zero-tolerance youth crime policies swept the US. Right around the same time the popularity of baseball began a decline in the US. It went from being a universally played ‘pickup culture’ sport, to a sparsely played ‘pay to play’ sport.
Now I’m not gonna say the need for 8 or 9 boys to roam around a neighborhood with a giant stick looking for a place to play was the reason the ‘pickup culture’ games died. But I will say that it was probably a lot safer for those boys to just go to a basketball court and wait their turn in a ‘pickup culture’ game that did not require a giant stick or bat.
This is way off. You only need a ball to play American football. Or a ball and bat to play baseball. Yes, the organized competitive versions have more gear involved, but so does organized soccer/football.
American Football is Canadian.
Baseball was invented in Britain.
The same is basically true for most other sports in the US too, and yet there are still high-level Americans. Certainly baseball (which other countries do still play in a limited fashion), hockey and football. With football we are undisputed world champs for the last 60 years! Joking aside, there is no doubt that high-level NFL players are seriously talented and their whole sport revolves around structured practices and weekly games.
Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.
I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.
The thing is that the US team sports you can think of such Baseball or American Football, have nearly no popularity outside of the US. Maybe Baseball in places like Japan or Venezuela.
Maybe the only parallel to soccer I can think of is sports like Rugby in UK and some English-speaking countries, Cricket in India, and some sports endemic to countries (such as GAA in Ireland).
The best way to compare the US to other countries in a sport that is similar in terms of interest among other countries is something like Volleyball. Which the US tends to be very good at, with many major competitors. I can't think of anywhere that volleyball is a #1 sport that sees a lot of unstructured play.
All this was obviously about team sports.
Baseball obviously has high popularity in a substantial number of non-US countries, though the main ones that feed the MLB (the DR, Venezuela, and Cuba) aren't often top-of-mind countries for many. The Japan/Korea interest is obviously non-trivial too.
Basketball is the obvious one you're leaving out that's about the same age as Volleyball (itself a US team sport), and probably has the most international popularity -- especially if just going by people-counting since China alone is an enormous market.
Funny thing, though: US players make up about 73% of the MLB but about 78% of the NBA, despite the NBA having more international popularity, and the current best players in both being from non-US countries.
The thing about basketball is that it is typically not a sport where it's a primary interest.
Go to places where you find good Basketball players. Germany, former Yugoslavian countries, Spain, Argentina... All those places are primarily Football countries.
You will find a few people interested in the sport, some youngster might be playing it for fun, but still very much behind football.
It's just not comparable.
Aren’t the ideal bodies pretty different for basketball and soccer? Are 6’6” guys a good size for soccer? How about taller? I’m sure European basketball players grow up playing soccer but at some point they end up playing to their strengths.
The tallest soccer players are right around 6’6”. Outside of positions like center back and striker (and keeper), they rarely exceed 6’0”.
That's... very American of it, still? The idea of a single sport in a country is weird and silly from a US point of view. I'm more interested in hockey, why would anyone think that would make me not a fan of basketall or football or baseball?
But... so? I thought we were talking about if these sports had "nearly no popularity"? Not if they were displacing soccer entirely. "Nearly no popularity" is pretty obviously false based on eyeballs and sales, even if soccer is more popular... And there's a lot more countries and people in the world than just Europe. (But also very American of you to ignore them ;) .) How much would it even matter to the NBA if China is or isn't primarily a basketball country, or just a country with hundreds of millions of fans that also have another sport above it in their personal rankings, if they're making money either way?
EDIT: and of course the name "soccer" originated in England because there were multiple foot-related games and so people made a more specific name. So maybe the weird countries are the ones that lost a fun multi-sport ecosystem and ended up a monoculture...
Baseball appeal in a country is always a history lesson. You can measure how a country was fucked up by USA based in their love of baseball: - Cuba - Japan - Panama - Venezuela
No other country can like a sport this boring.
Korea, Dominican Republic, Mexico all have pro leagues as well. There are more leagues growing in places like the UK and Australia as well though fully amateur at this point I think. Suffice it to say fans across all of these countries find it thrilling enough to play and watch.
I don’t understand the casual sniping against baseball. There are plenty of sports I have no interest in but I don’t call them out because nobody cares what I think of them.
Basketball?
I can’t speak to its actual popularity, but when I visit Europe and local folks hear I’m from the US, I’m surprised how often they are interested in talking about the NBA. Maybe it’s more pronounced in Eastern Europe where a lot of basketball talent has made it to the NBA over the years.
Well, if you are from the US, and I was talking to you about sports... Yeah, I would try to find a middle ground so that a conversation could happen. NBA is likely a reasonable thing to try.
Why would I bother talking to you about Bundesliga, Champions League, Libertadores Cup or whatever else?
Also, I worked with many people from Eastern Europe. Apart from Lithuania, I think all other countries are interested in Football more than in Basketball.
I believe most of what you said, but no college varsity player is playing only a few times a week. Even the lowest division of NCAA teams would have practice or matches 5-6 times a week in season.
So leaving aside whether 5-6 times is "a few," the bigger issue is the length of the season.
Varsity soccer season in the US is usually just four months, August-November.
Spring season (with no games) is February-April. During that season, NCAA places strict limitations on how often teams can practice: Division I and II teams are allowed only up to 8 hours per week, with just 4 of those being coach-supervised! [1]
Finally there is no organized playing for all of January, May, June and July.
So even for a player in a D1 team, they are training much, much less of the year than a 15-year-old on a farm team in Europe.
1. https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fal...
Sure, but as far as the people that are going to be professional, and good enough to play for a national team, you'd already be playing in the top levels of soccer by 19. Lamine Yamal was playing for the A team in Barcelona when he was barely 16, and was a starter in Spain's eurocup win at 17. More "normal" players, likePedri and Messi, played their first minutes for Barcelona at 17.
So if you even smell a college varsity team, you are already in the slow track. It's really rare to find a star that wasn't at least in a farm team at 15. I have a friend that was already there at 10, and his ceiling was just starter in a low tier team in La Liga.
What’s intriguing to me is that several American colleges end up becoming magnets for European and South American soccer players. My midwestern mid-tier alma mater’s soccer team is 95% non-American.
How proficient a country is at a given sport is derived from the size of the feeder pool. Baring extremely rare exceptions, top talent is strongly correlated with deep feeder pools.
Sports are always cultural: Kids grow up idolizing the stars of their childhood, and those stars are drawn from the sports their parents and community expose them to. In Europe, soccer is the biggest sport, everyone grows up watching soccer on weekends and so the feeder pool (i.e. the pool of kids who are drawn to the game) is much greater than other sports. Deep feeder pool allows the system to filter relentlessly to tease out the best.
In the US, and North America in general, kids grow up watching football, basketball, baseball and hockey. So that's what kids end up playing, and all of those sports have deep feeder pools. Soccer not so much.
I don't know why any reply disagrees with this.
Look at basketball in the US. The best players will tell you all they did as a kid was play basketball. You can go to anywhere somewhat populated and the outdoor courts are in use almost all the time school is not in session for pickup play. Outside of structured practice (if they are on a team), many kids are still playing pickup games or shooting casually.
Soccer fields rarely get use outside of structured play. Kids that play soccer in the US just don't play as much, so their skills are (on average) much worse.
This is pretty much true for all high level competition in the US.
It’s extremely hard to get good at chess. It’s extremely hard to get good at math. It’s extremely hard to get good at gymnastics. It’s extremely hard to get good at Piano.
Meanwhile, in China or Russia, there are dedicated schools for mass producing concert, pianist, etc.
What about baseball travel teams? Our kid plays travel soccer and it is expensive no doubt but our baseball parent friends pay more. I don't hear anyone complaining that baseball is pay to play.
Also, from what I hear hockey is also extremely expensive. I've heard that you can't leave a sporting goods store without spending at least $1,000 on gear alone for a season. I've yet to hear anyone complain that hockey is pay to play.
I think the other commenter has it right, most kids just gravitate towards American Football, Baseball, or Basketball.
And in the state I live in, of probably the top five soccer teams, one is a private school, the rest are public.
Edit: I don't know if other sports are like this but so many soccer parents are just extremely unrealistic/toxic. So many think they have the next superstar, questioning the coach on their child's play time, whey their kids didn't get placed on higher leveled teams, questioning why a coach is running practices certain ways.
Isn't the contention that, because football is pay to play in the US, the US isn't that good compared to places that it isn't pay to play?
Baseball, basketball, American football are all sports with much less international participation, and generally require pay to play elsewhere at around the same level as in the US, because of the way the sports are. There's no refutation possible from that.
I do agree its expensive but so many point to just the cost being the big issue.
How is it (on an international stage) our US women's national team is consistently good? The teams/clubs in our region charge the same for boys/girls. Related, I know the two biggest clubs by us do offer some financial aid (50% to 100% off).
Then there are clubs that don't charge as much. From our kid's team its the end of the season and we have 4 families leaving to another club that is easily 8x cheaper. So those types of teams/clubs do exist. Not to mention school teams don't charge to play.
At my high school and college, the best athletes were playing Football or basketball not soccer. If some of those athletic running backs were playing soccer all their life they would've been a problem.
If those running backs played soccer they'd all be asked to slim down. Soccer requires a mix of strength, agility and endurance.
The physical attributes needed for soccer are quite different from football or basketball. I don't think any football or basketball players would be good at soccer even if they tried.
Nope, not true at all. The average NFL CB makes the best athletes in soccer or rugby look like furniture movers, even in drills designed for soccer. Same for the majority NBA PGs. There is a lot of overlap in team sports for specific types of athleticism. The average pro you see on TV could usually beat the best player in your hometown at whatever sport they played. And not just beat, but beat badly. There are NFL DTs that can do 360 dunks and run a 40 in 4.6sec (at 300lbs) which is faster than your average pro striker in soccer.
That makes no sense. Some NFL guys may be fast but that's not all you need in soccer. You need to be quick but you also need ball control, endurance and in general understand tactics in depth.
A lot of top athletes will probably do pretty well in a lot of sports but they won't be world class in another sport. Even in motorsports Indycar or NASCAR drivers don't do well in Formula 1 despite them looking very similar.
Lebron as a goalie? Or hell half the nba...
It's not about structured/unstructured play at all. Basketball and hockey teams in the very same USA are world class.
It's about in which sports in the country the pro clubs pay top money. It's that simple. It sets up the incentives for families, and everything else follows.
99.99% of the kids who play in the street have a lot of fun but will never make it anywhere near pro sports.
Basketball is the only sport in the US that has a similar level of hundreds of hours a year of unstructured play, so it makes sense that the US is great at it.
Hockey, who is the US competing against? Canada. No other country in the world takes it particularly seriously, so of course the US is one of the top two countries... (I often tell each of my two kids that they're one of my top two kids.)
Isn’t the costing money part true for other sports too, in the U.S? I remember there was a report on how much it costs for kids to play sports (more perfect union video, I think) and it isn’t cheap. It is made worse by (what else?) private equity
+1. Want to add that in Europe promising players drafted by clubs by age of 10 already get soccer equipment and some token money ($50 / week), practice every day after school and transportation to out of town games is on the club’s bus. In the US at that age parents pay for the equipment, and drive their kids to every game-including out of town. And because US is so large these are long drives.
I think the real answer is money. If there were as many soccer fans wanting to watch games on TV as there are baseball, football, and basketball, the US would be in the top rankings.
Isn't soccer a mostly women's sport in the USA? Do boys even play it at all?
The USA women's team is world class, probably for this reason.
In the UK boys mostly play soccer while girls traditionally played netball (basketball).
Soccer is extremely widespread and played by both boys and girls at a young age (up until puberty or so), but there definitely is a gender gap after that. I'd guess that there are a lot of other sports that are almost solely played by boys, so boys tend to drift away from soccer, while there are fewer options for girls. (Though there are some - lacrosse and softball for a couple examples.)
Field hockey is almost exclusively a girls sport in the US, while boys have (American) football in the fall. Both draw from the potential pool of soccer players in US middle and high schools.
I don't think the unstructured format directly contributes to the playing strength but rather attracts more player to play in a local club. Even in the town where I life with less than 100'000 people there are 10 clubs, 168 teams and nearly 3000 (mostly semi-professional) soccer player. Of course not all of them are young anymore but extrapolate this numbers to the population of a country it becomes a huge talent pool available for the major clubs.
And compared to the US there is a far more dense competition as any state has its own national league and on top are the Champions, Europe and Conference league. So every major soccer team plays in a national and a europene league at the same time and thus the players get of course much more routine.
But hey, we suck at baseball and basketball.
Exactly. The same reasons why US players will never be better at table tennis also. It's the capitalist school and club system, which forbids any advantage in the early years. If you have to pay, you won't train that often.
What about women's soccer?
Despite the fairly similar cultural and financial incentives at play in Europe & South America, France and Spain (Portugal to an extent, as well) pretty much lead the footballing world in terms of elite talent. Their depth is ridiculous.
For France, their sporting renaissance, if we can call it that, started way earlier in the late 1960s with what we'd call "DEI" today: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-...
For Spain, correctly focusing on developing in-game intelligence and skill was key in out-competing stronger & taller teams (at a time when rapidly improving football pitches were proving great for playing positional & possession-based game): A very 1970s Dutch way of playing kick-started by Johan Cruyff in 1990s at Barcelona, and converted into concrete results for the national team by Luis Aragones & Vincente del Bosque in 2000s/2010s: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that...
> For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play."
This is true for most sports (and activities) in the US. Additionally, the US doesn't have the concept of unstructured play, as many (most?) kids are fully depend on the parent or the school to take them places, since most of the US is so car-dependent.
Yes, this is it.
> college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season
wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?
Also, now with NIL etc, college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league
> wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?
Of course. American varsity soccer players play ~5 times a week for four months a year, August through November.
February through April is the Spring season and varsity teams are forbidden from playing too much. D1 and D2 teams can only train 8 hours per week, of which at most 4 hours per week may be coached!
And then 4 months of the year are off-season and there is no structured training at all!
This is a ridiculously small amount of time compared to a 15 year old Spanish kid playing in a farm team.
And they're doing this part-time stuff until they're 22 or 23. A typical European professional player would have been playing full time since they were 16.
> college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league
... except no where near at the level of European farm teams.
The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US.
You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.
I love this - it seems so obvious but I had never thought about it that way!
I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either.
Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.
All I know to write about here is China: school is one massive obstacle for professional sports. Lots of kids in China try out tons of different hobbies and sports, and any sport or activity you can think of likely has a number of clubs in bigger cities, enough to create a community of people with a serious interest. I'm thinking of Chinese kids I know personally who are into football, breakdancing, archery, ballet, drama, all kinds of stuff.
And then, right at a child's age where European scouts are noticing kids over there, in China parents are hit with massive, massive pressure to help their kids academically as best they can. Good middle school -> good high school -> good university -> good job. Unless your kid is far and away a natural talent easily exceeding their peers, you're going to hesitate to let them devote more time to professionally developing athletic ability. Athletic competition at the highest levels in China is intense due to the number of natural talents you get in a large population, and with every year that goes by without your kid quite making it into the professional-athlete track, the pressure gets higher to abandon that track and focus on academics.
So the athletic practice, even for a quite promising kid, gets sidelined for more study time and after-school classes. And this happens even for kids with parents who want them to have a balanced life without the insane pressure for academics the Chinese school system is known for. For those families it just takes the shape of cutting back the athletic practice instead of nurturing it to a possibly professional level.
One other factor that I can think of is just a culture of family interest. I don't know any Chinese men older than 45 who are into watching sports at all, whereas in the West (and also India, I think?) it's common for a family interest in sports to have already existed for generations. I do know Chinese men my age (31) who are into basketball and have young kids who might grow up with that interest. That's all anecdotal, I know, but my sample is big enough for it to be surprising to me in comparison to other places.
Any insight into why China does relatively well at the Olympics?
State-run prestige programs. The exact opposite of mass participation sports like soccer.
A documentary, maybe it was China Heavyweight (which is maybe 15yo at this point, so it might be out of date today), suggested that kids are trained for many years for specific Olympic sports (and nothing else) based on their rough physical attributes. This shotgun approach has success at finding great individual athletes, and will probably ensure they have a reasonable chance at qualifying someone at as many events as possible. Maybe this is just how the boxing program is run though...
> … kids are trained for many years for specific Olympic sports (and nothing else) based on their rough physical attributes. This shotgun approach …
Looks a lot more targeted than “shotgun.” Not quite laser-focused, but certainly tighter than a wide-cast net.
I can’t speak for other countries but in India cricket eclipses all other sports and drains talent. But soccer is gaining popularity recently but still long way to go.
Field Hockey is huge in India too. (Thing is India is so big that anything that is big in India is big globally!)
What interesting is that unlike other nations in that list, Indonesians already love soccer to death, literally. But they're still very underrepresented in the world stage.
If you think about it, India and China already have other very popular sports. Soccer is kind of somewhat of a niche there.
Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.
> Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina.
Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.
What sport is popular in China?
Basketball is hugely popular in China, though it's more famous for ping-pong. In the evenings you can see pickup basketball games at every park and every public court, of which there are many.
This has been mentioned, if using different words, elsewhere in this thread but soccer is much more accessible and casual in Latin America and Western Europe. Children often live in cities/towns where they have high mobility and agency to move around and so can get together without adult management and play and develop more freely. It's not like the U.S. where it's very processed (soccer camp, parents need to drive their kids to a place that's basically professionally organized), et cetera.
The closest thing to that in the U.S. is kids playing basketball in Brooklyn or L.A.
Having grown up in Norway, where soccer has always been very popular, accessibility is a factor - I'd agree with that.
The majority of soccer we played as kids wasn't even on a pitch. If you had a wall, a football, and two objects (usually jackets) to mark the goal - you could play - and that's exactly what we did.
But yeah, small neighborhood pitches were usually easy to find.
Didn't read the post, but the problem is that in most top soccer countries, soccer is the number one sport, light-years ahead of everything else. In the US, several other sports are more popular, which drains the talent pool. Kids grow up immersed in soccer culture in places like Brazil, Argentina, Germany or Spain in a way that simply isn't as common in the US.
I think that is a contributor to the problem but the real problem is we do not yet know how to develop talent consistently in the US. FC Barcelona is easily the world reference recruiting kids around 7-8 years old and building them mentally, physically and tactically into incredible players. Something like half or more of their current roster came through la masía at some point. And something like half the Spain world cup roster plays for Barcelona.
There are soccer academies in the US but it is still relatively new and we do not have a great development model yet. Youth academies are also fairly antithetical to how talent pipelines work for the established US sports.
I mean you could say that baseball academies in Brazil aren’t good yet either, but I wouldn’t say that it’s because they “don’t know how to.”
It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular, except they already have soccer plus even basketball is growing quicker.
In America, soccer just isn’t that popular and there are so many other sports that people currently care about more.
> It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular
Baseball is a hardware-intensive sport. It's hard to get popular in poorer countries. Soccer on the other side demands just a vacant lot and some soft round object you can kick around to get started.
You just need a bat and ball? My friends use a plastic bat balls and find a grassy field. Soccer balls are actually more expensive.
Basketball is growing in Brazil a lot and that’s kind of expensive.
Skateboarding has become massive in Brazil and that’s even more expensive than soccer and every person needs their own skateboard, unlike soccer where you can pool your money to share 1 ball.
Idk what you are talking about, you don’t need fancy equipment to play most sports with your friends. Most of the time, it’s having the idea is the issue.
There is no supply chain of baseballs and baseball bats in Brazil. That would be considered a "exotic" choice of sport, with those supplies only available at expensive stores with imported goods
Right, but the limiting factor is not actually that it’s expensive.
The limiting factor is historical: Brazilians just don’t think of playing baseball already.
Which leads back to the point: Americans just don’t really think about playing soccer.
It’s not about cost, or about leagues, or any technical thing. There’s nothing stopping me, as an American, from trying cricket with my friends, except that the thought has never ever entered my mind.
Yes yes, boils down to network effect (that comes from those historical aspects).
Not if you want to develop world class talent. Baseball is incredibly technology dependent at this point. Ultra high speed cameras, radars, bat and ball sensors, software tying it all together, it's become rocket science. And honestly, if you don't have access to that technology, your chances fall dramatically.
But you’re only competing with other leagues in your own country.
The article is about global soccer, I'm talking about global baseball (MLB takes all the best players in the world). If you are a pitcher wanting to make it to the MLB, getting to 18 and throwing 65 mph and claiming "well that works in my country" isn't going to help you. You are miles behind.
Frankly that is a bad comparison. Soccer is incredibly popular at a youth level. The talent pool is there and the money is there. How big is the Brazilian baseball economy? As the article states there is about $1.5bn in player value in the MLS. Not to mention that our top tier talent is usually exported to Europe where there is an order of magnitude more money available for the sport. My argument is we have a big talent pool of kids who want to be successful in soccer and we have not learned how to manage it at scale. The talent market of potential players is incredibly fragmented.
Edit: typos
I get this argument, and it is probably partially right, but is soccer really competing for the same athletes as basketball and American football? Basketball players are mostly too tall for soccer (other than goalie), and a majority of football players are way bigger than great soccer players. Baseball and hockey might compete for the same athletes, but a huge percentage of baseball and hockey players also come from other countries.
Those genetic requirements come into play at elite levels, but you need to start young, when those differences are less obvious.
You need to look at what sports an eight-year-old is playing in the backyard, what sports his Dad is excited about on the TV.
An agile, fast, coordinated kid who's coachable and wants to train hard but is going to grow up to be 5' 8" is not going to make the NFL or the NBA, but if they've got the athleticism to play in the World Cup... well, in the US that kid will be the point guard on the local high school basketball team and also play safety and wide receiver on the football team.
In India, they'd be a cricket star.
The difference in sports culture leads to almost no talent getting wasted.
I grew up in a European (Holland) country and as boys we'd play soccer all the time, during school on the schoolyard, after school, in the evening and the vast majority of boys in my class joined the local soccer team (me included). Even though we were a local team in a small village, scouts of slightly more important teams would sometimes come to our matches.
Basically, because soccer is so ingrained in our culture, virtually all boys play soccer at some point. That combined with all the clubs that play at different levels, and the scouting network, virtually no talent is missed.
Put differently, when a new Cruyff or Robben is born, there is a high probability that he will be found.
Women's soccer is really a different story. It has only started to take off in recent years and at least as many girls seem to play hockey.
Of course, it should be said that the only sport that really matters is Korfbal/Korfball :).
It definitely is at the youth level. I don’t think any football or basketball pros could be soccer stars, but absolutely there are kids who are star point guards on their youth basketball team but top out at 5’8”, or football players who never make it past high school but could have been great at soccer.
Well no, an existing professional American football player has no chance of switching to being a professional soccer player. Nobody can simply switch at that level. You have to have cultivated the skills over a long period of time to ever have a chance at competing at the highest levels.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine the guys that ended up being cornerbacks, wide receivers, safeties, or even halfbacks couldn’t have become soccer professionals given the right culture, training, and desire growing up. Sure, linemen, tight ends, and fullbacks aren’t built for soccer.
The thing is you cannot just switch sports.
When we are talking about the really TOP elite of football those kids get into it at age 5. From that age on every day consists of hours of football. There are scouts looking at prepubescent kids all over the world ready to sign them.
That's the point. Since so many sports are competing for "player attention", people may commit to the "wrong" sport early on, be decent, and then top out at an age where it's too late (in terms of going pro) to switch to a sport they may have been great at.
In a hypothetical world where every kid plays only soccer, every potentially great soccer player has been practicing the sport from an early age. In a world with 10 competing sports, some potentially great soccer players might have be playing baseball or basketball from a young age up into their late teens.
Perhaps the kids that could be soccer superstars stick with basketball until they figure out they aren't tall enough for the NBA, but are too old or just never developed enough interest in soccer to become a pro at that. But if they didn't have that NBA dream growing up, they may well have become a soccer superstar?
Kids who are good at sport excel at it all throughout school years, then once they hit college age the smaller ones dont make it further in American football any more - but they still spent their childhood playing it. In e.g. Uraguay its probably opposite, the naturally heavy guys cant compete at top level soccer (Im guessing) and fall out of professional sports
I think it is less about competing for athletes and more about competing for national attention (in the form of sports viewership that turns into money and school programs).
For national teams you only need to consider outlier athletes not averages. And many of the most top athletes at sport A would do very well at sport B. If a country funnels 100% of kids into a single sport, every single genetically gifted athlete will be put through the same selection process. Imagine every single physically gifted kid going to tryouts of the same sport. That's Portugal.
The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.
I don’t think this is fully correct. Athletic skill is not universal across sports. A athlete that can be trained to be a star football player may not be able to be trained to be a star baseball player.
Even though chances of succeeding in any are small, a potential athlete has far more to gain by being successful at football/basketball/baseball than at soccer. It's nearly impossible for even a star athlete to succeed at more than one sport, (see also, Michael Jordan) so anyone who wants to be a famous athlete has no incentive to train for anything other than the top three sports.
> It's nearly impossible for even a star athlete to succeed at more than one sport
I don't think this means as much as you're putting weight into.
I think the fact that somebody like MJ or Tim Tebow could even get a try-out in a different profession sports really speaks to top level talent being fungible. Like just imagine somebody practices being a Doctor for 20+ years and then gets an interview to be a World Cup Referee. Sure, they might not succeed at the other sport but the fact they can still do it is I think proof of sports fungibility.
It's not that top athlete's aren't well above average in a sport that they didn't dedicate their life to, it's that without that dedication they don't have a chance of being a top athlete in that sport that disincentivizes potential athletes from training in multiple sports.
I don’t think that fully aligns with my observations. The US outputs plenty of star athletes in minor sports. Swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc. It’s not all incentives like the mythical economic rational actor, especially when we’re talking about choices adolescents are making.
I think there is a more self selection process happening for athletes and sports. People with natural athletic inclinations try lots of sports young, they will do well in the ones they are most suited for, and begin taking that seriously.
No one in any country is going to be a famous athlete for swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc., so they're all competing against athletes that are also competing in that sport for the love of the sport, whereas someone playing whichever sport is called football in that country has a chance of becoming a famous athlete.
There are many multi sport athletes in the high school ranks and elite athletes in college are drafted in multiple professional leagues. You can see known lists here including baseball:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multi-sport_athletes
The list for college and high school would be huge. There is such a thing as athletic skill, I’ve heard it called a kinesthetic gift. People with particularly good builds, strengths, speed, agility, etc. can train those attributes across several different disciplines. As you get higher and more elite you will eventually have to specialize. “Jocks” in high school frequently played multiple sports and many lettered in multiple as well.
This is probably less true than you'd think. Freak athletes are great athletes no matter the sport.
There's kind of a soft cap on NFL player height at about 6'5" or 6'6" - hardly anybody is taller than that. But the NBA is majority guys 6'6" or taller. That split isn't because all those kids got sorted into the right sport when they were kids. It's because if you're enough of an athlete to go pro and tall enough to make a living off basketball, that's a lot easier life with a longer career than playing football.
Kids don't pick a sport based on the one they have the most potential in. Some parents might, but kids would pick a sport based on the one they enjoy, which will be influenced by social pressures. The question isn't "can they go pro in the second sport," the question is "can they play the second sport well enough to play with / impress their friends."
The root cause is that no one watches soccer so there’s no money in it. It’s not like there’s a limit of 3 sports we could send athletes to, but since no one watches soccer here there’s no money for fields, equipment, training, coaching, athletic science, etc.
This comment is wild :) In Europe we send our best athletes into athletics, not sport. Athletics is track and field, which reduces to speed, strength and endurance. Sport - football, cricket, tennis - is about technical mastery first, and only secondarily the speed strength and endurance to support it. Lionel Messi and Sachin Tendulkar would both have been deselected by any athletic selection procedure. The emphasis on athleticism over technical mastery is what makes American sport boring.
Messi was in a full time Futbol Academy playing futbol 6 hours every single day when his physical attributes diverged away from his peers.
He also runs a 4.6-second 40 meter dash, well fast enough for the NFL combine.
It's slightly more than that. These sports (and let's include hockey, since it's played widely intentionally too) are all organized the same way, meaning the players are largely trained the same way leading up to college and also in the pros. There's a clear pipeline to the basketball and hockey national teams. The best league is the one closest to home. The uniform pipeline and playing close to home makes training for, coaching and playing with the national team that much easier, which makes the team that much better.
American men gotta find their own way to become a world class soccer player. There's no pipeline like there is for the big 4. It's harder for teammates to gel when some went through the ranks in Germany, some in England, some in Italy and have only a few weeks with a new coach to buy into the system.
America's biggest rivals also aren't very good. So while the best European and South American teams constantly have to play each other and fight for survival, the US has to play middling teams like Mexico and Canada and tiny Central American and island nations.
Money.
Typical amount of commercials time per game:
NFL 60-65 min
NBA 40-50 min
MLB 40-50 min
NHL 25-35 min
MLS/Premier League/World Cup 10-20 minI watched a game of American football once and was blown away by how many adverts there were. It's such a slow game too - so much stopping between tackles for deliberation (seemingly). Don't get it personally.
I was going to go with money -- the amount of money to put kids through soccer in a competitive program in USA/CANADA is way more than the competitive programs in europe. That immediately drops down the amount of talent that can make it through the system + anyone who is particularly good and has any connections to europe goes there to level up faster by playing more competitive players.
It's called Football. Naming something right (like the rest of the world) is first step to getting good at it.
Not American. Don’t live in US. The outside impression I get is that the game simply isn’t one of the kids’ default street sports.
It's not. The first time I ever saw kids playing soccer on their own with no adult supervision was when I left the US. I haven't seen it since I've been back. I think that's the most glaring "issue" right there.
Correct. We actually don't play "football" properly as a street sport either though... its typically a flag style football (two hand touch, etc) but the main sports are (generally separated by season during school) football, hockey/basketball, baseball.
This is part of it, but you only need a few dozen great players to put together a program. Another part is organization. Italy has kids playing calcio in the streets by default, but FIGC has been run poorly for decades. USSF tries, but similarly is a little in over their heads.
the US has a large relatively recent influx of Latino populations, and they play a lot of soccer, and in a number of cultures also baseball
Interesting, I didn’t think of that. Growing up in Brazil, soccer was essentially the only sport boys played, at every opportunity.
In the absence of a ball, we’d dislodge the plastic ball from a roll on deodorant packaging and play with that, or a table football ball (which hurt a lot).
Then - in my late teens - studying in the UK football (soccer) was also predominant, played during breaks etc.
My point being that the US is along other large nations such as India, China which culturally favour other games/sports.
Contrast these nations with Uruguay for example, tiny country… has won the World Cup. I do not know this, but I’d hazard a guess that soccer is THE game in the streets of Uruguay.
Yup. For many years in DC just about the only people that went to DC United games were Latinos. They are still the dominant supporters of professional US soccer I think.
I had a surreal experience one day after work. I lived on a cul de sac and it was common to have kids play baseball or kickball in the summer. There was one Indian family on the street and the eldest boy had convinced them to try cricket that day. Heard him yelling “Bowl it! Bowl it!” So yeah, immigrants add a lot to the US including sports.
My related question to this was why isn't China or India better at soccer? Given the population sizes and some reasonable talented soccer player probability you would think they would be outsized. Then you have the tiny East European countries that get medals. It's fascinating
It’s not so popular in China. Basketball is somehow.
In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.
a country can only be so good at so many sports of this type. Every american playing basketball, or baseball, or american football, or ice hockey, is one not playing football. You have to understand that for many countries, the dream path, the default one, for a very athletic young person who is interested in team sports is soccer, from the age of 6 or younger. The entire structure above that branches outward based on this huge intake of talented children, with vast institutions of professional coaches, academies, and huge amounts of training and game time with other talented people, no matter where in the country they live.
Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business.
This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.
I think the rest of the world is rapidly catching up whent it comes to girls.
Also, in the US until very recently, there was no path for women athletes to make sports their career after college. Soccer could be a path to a scholarship but you were going to have to get a "real" job after that even if you wanted to continue to pursue Olympic or World Cup level goals in the sport. The NWSL is changing that but salaries are still nowhere near the men's game, nor any other male dominated professional league.
How come Ghana, a third world country with a much smaller population and GDP, and probably less organizational capacity, has eliminated the US twice at the world cup? Granted, the US finally got its revenge, but still...
So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.
> Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.
But would you say the same about the basketball where the US is dominating both the men and woment tournaments?
I'm sorry to say I'm glad the US are not better at soccer. Given they already have some of the finest pop artists in movies and songs, it seems to me it's a fair balance
The US isnt better at soccer because our best potential soccer players are playing defensive back or point guard.
It's that simple.
The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer.
As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great.
Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.
The is probably the most significant reason. The top athletes are pulled into other sports which have higher cultural status and financial rewards.
"Soccer is like the metric system of sports."
No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it.
Different sports.
(I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)
I think you're looking at the comparison from the wrong angle. The parent poster meant the USA does not take up the metric system because the imperial units are seen as part of their culture while metric is a 'foreign' thing. Typically American sports like baseball, American 'football' and basketball are seen as part of American culture as well while football (which for some unexplainable reason is called 'soccer' in the USA) is seen as the foreign thing, just like metric. It is not like any of these sports is better or worse in any way, in the end they're all forms of ritualised warfare without (too much) bloodshed and they all work in this regard: the winner gets the spoils, the loser gets to leave the field with their tails drooping.
Yes, your angle is more interesting.
> Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy
The clear logic behind soccer is low barrier of entry. A vacant lot, some friends and a makeshift ball gets any child started. Even the poor can play it with minimal inputs.
The most interesting point here is to look at Women's Soccer.
Soccer has always included lots of psuedo-nationalist reasons why different countries are better (or why the dive, why they play conservative defense, etc).
But when you look at the success of the US Women's team it's very clear that the main thing is investment in building talent. The rest of the world does it for mens soccer (football) because that's what they do. When Title 9 went into effect America put a huge amount of money (relative to other countries) into womens soccer and the US Womens team has been one of the best in the world every since.
At the most fundamental level, men’s soccer doesn’t get the best athletes. Those go to football, basketball, and baseball.
In women’s soccer they do get the best atheletes. We’ve won half of the world cups and Olympics.
It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent.
Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.
Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.
Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.
In the US, you have some special factors:
- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.
- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.
- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.
On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.
I find it good that US is not better at soccer. Soccer or football has gained too much importance in Europe and South America. We have seen it encourage unprecedented levels of gambling, insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football, fan violence inside and outside the stadiums, corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics, and more.
The United States experiences the same sort of issues, just with different sports.
Lol it’s the same with the sports in America. People love gambling on sports no matter what country they live in.
What you describe is pretty much true for every single american sport too
>unprecedented levels of gambling
Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings
>insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football
Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe
>corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics
Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music.
>fan violence inside and outside the stadiums
This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that
OK I 've never been to the US, so I believe you. Then the problems are more widespread: not only soccer, but professional sports in general are harmful in my opinion.
I really have to disagree with you there. Football's damage to society, which I no doubt does exist, much less than the damage due to class divide and capitalism as a whole.
Football in England is sometimes demonized by the media, but specifically footballers. Footballers have historically been the punching bag of the low brow media. "Rio Ferdinand on 150k a week does something bad". "Wayne Rooney caught in latest scandal, 200k a week ace in shambles" etc etc. They love to mention how much they earn, but they never talk about how football is one of the very remaining professions which are purely meritocratic. The few professions where talent is enough and offers social mobility. Most footballers are working class and yet they're blamed, and football is blamed too.
But what's so bad about something that brings people together to bond over a game? Hooligan violence isn't really a thing anymore. Gambling is a separate issue. It's not football's fault that people like to gamble. The politicians could make it illegal.
Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions fans have something to say about fan violence.
Everything you said (gambling, fan violence, billionaires who get money from cash strapped cities) applies to the US. If you substitute soccer with NFL, MLB, and NBA the statement stands.
I would say you Americans are more into gambling while in Europe fan violence is a bigger topic. Like just last week, after PSG won the Champions League title, there were cars burning in Paris:
https://apnews.com/article/psg-arsenal-paris-budapest-champi...
Honestly this is why i stopped playing and watching any soccer. Every match the city would turn into a fortress and still there would be regular riots, the game seemed to have taken second seat and its more about whats going on around it. Even when games got cancelled because of violence in the stadiums, the ‘game’ would continue outside (violence). So tiring, boring, destructive, terrible.
some good points such as lack of promotion/relegation but ultimately misses the root cause
Requirements to forming a division 1 league, as determined by the ‘US Soccer Professional League Standards’:
- minimum 12 teams (14 by year 3)
- each team’s principal owner has individual net worth of $40M
- 75% of teams located within major metro markets (at least 1M people)
- 15,000 seat stadium (and enclosed)
- teams located in each of the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones
https://www.ussoccer.com/organization-members-directory/pro-...
As for how these requirements were determined… no clue. Never received an answer. Jury’s still out on that…
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-soccer-must-face...
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-120/274688/2023...
I think this comes down to higher competition and practice in Europe.
A football is the default “toy” given to young lads, and you can play anywhere with anyone.
So much so there are custom “no ball games” signs in many neighbourhoods due to noise averse residents getting annoyed.
There are also many supporting elders who try to improve and guide skill development.
Because USA has different national sports and it never gave much attention in football like Argentina or even Germany. Still USA has amazing Basketball, with its NBA.
It’s American TV. The free to watch stations can’t show a halftime of 45 minutes without ad breaks. They couldn’t do this when TV was the only big entertainment in the last century and now TV matters less, so that window of time is gone.
He asks if it's an MLS problem but doesn't dig into the poor management decisions that persist at the MLS level, and though he does touch on the lack of relegation, and he doesn't touch at all on the US Soccer Federation's consistently poor choices for USMNT head coach. We're presently stuck with a guy who praises the players getting into constant on-field fights and each manager constantly makes nepotistic selections for team slots who are under-performers yet constantly praised, or even worse this year, who seem to be chosen for their unfocused non-game-enhancing aggression. That sort of mis-focus might work if playing in leagues where that is the norm, but world-class players and teams play with technique, and the rough play BS lasts as long as the officials allow it and doesn't win in the long term, which is where you have to aim to win championships. It's arguable if we'd even be in the Cup this time if we weren't hosting, and I'll be surprised if we get out of the group stage this time.
Several Factors: 1.Socker does not have pause of the game as a result no add, mean not commercial $$$. Several years ago research show that none of EU socker team are profitable. 2. Boring game. Watching 90 min for maybe 1-0 score
Huh half time?
US is the world best at american football :fireworks:
Because of absurd bike-shedding by soccer purists.
Literally: just have a clock the counts down. That alone would reduce confusion but casual consumers who don’t understand the rules.
This isn’t hard.
It really just comes down to TV viewership. More people watch other sports so the kids want to play those instead
I remember when in grad school, there were two casual sports leagues for the grad students: Softball and soccer.
The best softball teams were the MBA and law students, who were mostly American.
But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.
we have a idiom/joke to describe this: "美中不足" ( which origins means a flaw within beauty). but 美 also means America 中 also means China and 不 = no/not 足=foot/soccer..so Neither country is very good at football (soccer). of course china sucks more on this
After decades of hearing the same valid reasons I've recently begun to think that soccer just pales against alternatives.
Why do I need to age verify to read this?
Answer is simple.
Why isn't U.S. better at Field hockey, Badminton, Cricket, Ping pong etc.?
Ideally a capitalistic system is supposed to produce the best or close to the best in each category to stay competitive then what gives?
Capitalism produces the "best" in categories where there is a high demand for a product. In the U.S., the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. This is closely entwined with "culture".
This is why the U.S. leads in sports that are tailored for television and massive stadium revenue. Sports that are more nuanced, low-scoring, or lack a domestic TV or the US cultural zeigeist simply cannot compete for the attention span of the American consumer, and by extension, the capital that follows that attention.
Is modern baseball "high-production-value entertainment"?
For basketball and American football, those sports weren't exactly blockbusters either. The rules and strategies of those games have been carefully tailored over the years to cater to action and scoring, something that was never going happen to the rules (or laws) of soccer.
Agree. "Culture" provides the nurturing "gap fill" while the capital is not exactly flowing and rules are evolving over time. Culture keeps the lights on in lean years and builds camaraderie when the sports is thriving.
Cannot keep count on how many times I have heard of "Babe Ruth" (1895 - 1948) mentioned in a movie/tv show entertainment context, where a grandpa or an elderly figure is fondly reminiscing things to their gen X grandkids!
> the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment.
What part of American football or baseball is high-scoring or high-production-value or entertaining?
It's hard to keep track of how many times American football or Baseball is used as a back drop of some TV shows or a hollywood blockbuster. How many US pop culture figures have performed at half time shows. How many U.S. heads of states have mentioned about their favorite teams and stadiums etc.,
Doesn't answer my question.
If curling was traditional American sport, you'd get curling instead.
An average NFL game is 11 minutes of action. High production and entertainment lol.
My problem is I can’t stay interested for long.
Yes, it’s possible that it’s a “me” problem.
90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle.
If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.
Football (or soccer for you) can be insanely high tempo and insanely slow and boring. Depends on the game.
But the low scoring is actually one of the most important things in soccer.
A goal in soccer is so much more precious than in any other sport. It can win you the game, as almost a third of games have one or less goals in the game. So the euphoria when the team scores outweigh any "boringness" that preceded it. It can only be compared to a sudden death win in hockey (another relatively low scoring game, though a not as low as soccer).
Those not into soccer don't really understand this, and many have tried to increase the number of goals scored. But it doesn't make the game better. An 8-2 score is much more boring than a 2-0 game, as the nerve is there all game.
I got into soccer late (watching it, as I was playing it all the time as kid). The best aspect is that it can be incredibly hard to score and a goal requires good team coordination and individual skills, which must be better than those of the adverse teams.
Once you get familiar with it, it becomes an anticipation game. And you on the stand usually as a better view of a play than the players. So while there’s only passing going on, you start to sense the strategy shifts. And you may even think it’s either doomed or have a high chance of success, but the opposite happens.
A goal is the reward for high amount work, not a foregone conclusion. That’s what makes a penalty so painful.
In addition to the sibling comment, I'd say that to enjoy the game, you really need to appreciate what's hard, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, and how much training goes into all that.
But I guess it is hard to do that later in life, if you did not grow up in a football (soccer) culture, maybe playing recreationally as a boy, and avidly following the game.
I think it’s hard to truly appreciate any sport you haven’t played yourself. I personally cannot get excited about baseball, and it’s probably mostly because of my own lack of playing experience.
Because it's not a popular professional sport here like it is everywhere else.
It's the culture.
I'm from Spain and living in Mexico. Football in these countries is almost like a religion.
Yet Mexico is no better at soccer than America, broadly speaking. There is also a general feeling that in the US is better at developing talent than Mexico at this point. Some of Mexico's best national team prospects in recent years were developed by MLS academies.
You definitely need other factors but societal passion seems like the cornerstone. The US has everything except this.
Personally couldn't care any less about sports. I say this as an external observer.
That is because you call it "soccer"?
Because Americans don't really like the sport, it isn't popular in America, and thus nobody gets their kids to play it, resulting in Americans not really liking the sport, ad infinitum.
The article at one point says "No two members of the 26-man roster play on the same club team" about the USMNT.
However, it seems that these two players both play for PSV Eindhoven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi And also these two players both play for Borussia Mönchengladbach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna
Is the article wrong? This is the only claim I bothered to check. Should I assume the rest is wrong, too?
I think it's that the US follows a red ocean strategy. They don't compete on saturated markets, they'd rather make their own markets and be in a market of one, like NFL.
If LeBron James grew up in England, he’d be the greatest soccer goalkeeper in history.
I think in that episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" they put it much more simply - Here in South America (and Europe) soccer "is a religion".
Because there´s not anything called soccer
Athletic American men can probably make more money playing another sport. You get perks like (mostly) free college. Paths to the pros are less uniform than the college -> pro pipeline, so even when the US has a generation of 11+ world class players, because they've been trained differently and play much further away from home, they can't come together with just a few weeks of training as easily as, say, a basketball team. Plus, the local competition isn't very good. It's just other middling teams and tiny countries.
Conversely, the NWSL is likely the most lucrative league for women besides the WNBA. In both cases, it's a legit pipeline from college to the pros. Women's hockey is similar. So you have a group of players who know each other, have been playing together for a while and were roughly trained the same way. Also, the second best women's soccer team happens to be in their "division".
They can come together as a team better than American men who all went through different training programs from youth.
I’ll throw in my pet theory. American football is rooted in infantry maneuvers Civil War through WWII. Soccer is closer to cavalry, a Second Millennium European experience.
Cavalry was never that important in the military experiences of Americans since its founding a mere 250 years ago, whereas lots of folks served in the infantry — Civil War through WWII. The US, moreover, is essentially a 20th Century country; infantry, tanks, air forces, etc. is 20th Century warfare; and American football echoes those 20th Century technologies.
The romantic ideal and practical effectiveness of cavalry over many centuries, ending in the 20th Century/WWI, made it much more deeply ingrained in the European (Old World) psyche. Soccer is cavalry, thus Europe and past colonies gravitated towards it.
This is like asking why isn’t the US better at Cricket.
I remember they were not that bad, some years ago. But sports is already heavily covered in the USA: basket ball, american football and so forth. Establishing a new sport is harder in such an environment.
why isn't russia, china, india?
Sports are artifacts of culture. Although the US does remarkably well in soccer despite soccer not being a mainstay of american culture. The question should be, how come the US does so well in soccer, despite it still being a niche sport (even then mostly for older generations).
Soccer is much more popular with gen-alpha and to an extent gen-z (thank youtube).
A lot of the top national teams have players that play in the premier league or some other european league. The American national team (last i recall, haven't kept up) typically only play in the MLS where even then the foreign players treat it as a last stop before retirement when they do have premier league experience.
iron sharpens iron, competition is what it's all about, year round. I wonder why the premier league didn't expand to the US, Canada and beyond? it has global popularity but with not logistical or technical inhibitions, it still is a europe only (keep in mind, europe is still a bunch of countries, so international) club. There aren't enough matches to make a 1-2 6-8 hour international flights a week that big of a deal (assuming a day of recovery afterwards), and/or matches can be scheduled so that they move to one side of the atlantic after a few weeks and back after a few more instead of lots of back and forth.
I would say the NFL and the NBA dominate US culture, but today, the MLS and NHL are about the same level with younger generations as soccer -- if you include all of soccer as one thing instead of just the MLS.
What are you talking about? They've been world champ repeatedly.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-histo...
The qualifier is literally the sub-headline and is mentioned several times in the article.
Yet it is not in the submission. How am I to know you all assume male sporting events?
> The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show.
That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.
This is hilarious because we think the same about any sport that isn't soccer (football) in much of Latin America: "basketball / baseball is what girls play" is the tagline folks said growing up
Absolutely. It's funny how that works in a way. And then we end up with articles like "how come such and such a sport isn't popular, it's obviously such a great sport".
Some of it may be just adversarial, Americans wouldn't like soccer because well they want to feel special and different than Europeans. And likely Europeans or say Brazilians just wouldn't like American football, it just looks goofy to them.
> That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms.
I’ve never heard that, in fact there are more boys who play in America than girls.
It's funny, at Cornell I think the men play soccer better than the woman unequivocally but at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but stupid game whereas the women play a much smarter game when it comes to controlling the space.
A men's and women's sport that can be played with the same facilities is an economic plus -- college soccer is a great way to have fun supporting your school. It's a very different situation than field hockey, which is almost exclusively a woman's sport in the US although it is a huge men's sport in India and many other countries.
The insane level of flopping with no dignity or shame, and the insane level of allowing this to happen without any penalties is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t watch soccer. Those in charge WANT soccer players to flop but I don’t understand why. It’s dishonorable and weak but the sport does nothing to stop it.
Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.
If all you see in soccer is fake flopping, that means you do not really appreciate nor understand the game, you do not understand what hard and what's easy, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, etc
The fake flopping happens sometimes, but overall it hardly detracts from the game. It would be like me saying false starts is why I don't watch the 100 m dash.
And I'd be wary of thinking a fall is fake when the referee and the linesmen who are actually on the field think otherwise. Note that soccer is mostly not supposed to be a physical contact game. It was much more like that up to the 1070s. In fact, the infamous and relentless fouling of Pelé in the 1966 World Cup was a major catalyst for the creation of the red and yellow card system.
Gamesmanship in soccer is not more egregious than in say basketball. If you look at the nonsense ronnie coleman did in his day you wouldn't be complaining about soccer players
Ronnie Coleman, the bodybuilder?
Because we have 4 other sports that originated in the Americas: basketball, gridiron football, hockey, and baseball.
If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or we have two other sports that are totally different.
Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.
American football originated from Rugby and Baseball originated from Rounders.
Basketball players are almost a completely separate population from soccer players. The shortest basketball player would almost be too tall for soccer.
This is definitely an exaggeration. The median NBA player is 6'5" according to [0]. Most top teams will have a few players around that height, even excluding goalkeepers (though heavily weighted towards central defenders and centre-forwards).
Even if it's directionally correct, the point made further up in the thread is very important: basketball players aren't a different population from soccer players at age 14, when they need to pick something to be serious about if they are going to end up in the big leagues. Lots of them choose basketball, turn out not big enough, but would have been perfectly fine in soccer.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1btj60p/oc...
"too tall for soccer" is something of a weird statement, given the large advantage height gives in the game. Even at high levels, some teams' strategy resvolves around having a couple tall guys (and many other teams keep tall guys to deal with those same strategies). It of course isn't everything, given the need for stamina, sprinting, and strength, which are hard to have all at once in a tall person. But its not uncommon for defenders and some strikers to be 6'8" or upward - average height in the premier league is 6'1" and creeping upward each year
It is extremely uncommon, in fact, to the extent that the English premier league doesn't have a single player "6'8" or upward".
Lots of 6'4" players, though, which is comfortably tall enough for professional basketball.
https://www.zonalsports.com/ranking/tallest-premier-league-p...
From a biomechanics point of view, I think there is a point where it becomes a disadvantage.