This has always been a head scratcher for me. Once someone utters best athlete everyone seems to rush off and think you mean some 6 foot 5 inch 250 pound monster. Sorry to continue the hijack, but this is a very prevalent attitude around here.
Andy Roddick might have been a decent winger. Lots of kickers in the NFL too. Jimmer Fredette from BYU. I could go on.
I think you are understating just how good of athletes some of these guys really are. Messi might not be tall, but he's fast as hell and has a first step that would break the ankles of most. Wouldn't be shocked one bit if he was as fast as some of the fastest NFL players at least over 40 yards. I've watched him leave people in a stand still and jump over players for headers too many times to think he's not exceptionally athletic.
Yeah, I definitely agree. I've seen Messi's name pop up in too many skill>athleticism arguments. The guy has a ton of both.
Xavi? Insane stamina to be able to cover more ground than anyone else as a central mid. Phenomenal balance and foot-eye coordination and lateral movement. Pretty athletic.
Perhaps you underrate the role of athletic ability in being able to develop elite skill. Very few can read the game like Clint Dempsey. Plenty of small guys dominate in scholastic and college football/basketball. There's no reason to think players like Lampard, Rooney, and Messi likewise couldn't do so.
Pure athleticism is not all that important in the NFL either. Emmitt Smith ran 4.55 out of college. Jerry Rice and Wes Welker (a standout soccer player, btw) ran 4.6. Terrell Suggs of the 5 Pro Bowls fame ran 4.84 at the combine. Marvell Wynne can outrun all of those guys in a 40. And Chad Barrett can outrun Robin van Persie in the 40. Ah, but what if Chad Barrett played soccer.
There's certainly a point where a player is good enough of an athlete to be "effective." In the first three you point out in Smith, Rice and Welker, you are looking at three athletes that were under evaluated in there abilities. Also, all three are consummate professionals and renowned for their off-season work. Rice's off-season workouts in particular were legendary. Haven't really heard much about Wynne in that regard. Emmitt Smith is one that I point to who I think would have made one heck of a soccer player if things had turned out differently. His ability to move suddenly and change directions so quickly that he would have wrecked havoc on most defenses (Much like he did in the NFL). Not so different from Messi. Emmitt is also a guy who would be successful in just about any endeavor. Football, Dancing with the Stars, business. The man is a success at whatever he does. Only if Chad Barrett had played soccer ;-)
Good discussion. I think the idea on someone like Chad Barrett is: what if fifty 15-year old Chad Barretts played and had a passion for soccer instead of one? About 25 of them would end up a lot like the real Chad when they were 25. A couple would give up the game by the time they were 16. But maybe one would perform a lot more like Wayne Rooney.
Great point. It's about expanding the pool of players so that when we get to the top of the pyramid we not only have our most technically gifted, but that they are also quite physically gifted as well. Part of the problem still is that coaches at youth level see the physical gifts of certain players and shape their team around those abilities instead of developing the technical side of those players. So we end up with a pile of players pushed through youth systems with greatly underdeveloped skills but can run like gazelles.
I am new to the thread so someone has probably brought this up but the irony to it all is that Messi was not developed in Argentina. He was developed in the Barca system. So using that as a standard there is probably some kid in Germany somewhere that is going to be our super star.
Different point, though. What you're talking about is desire on the part of the players and professionalism on the part of the trainers, not mainly athleticism or numerical size. Our 'tiny, merely-good-athlete' pool of high school aged boys players is larger than the entire 14-18 boys population of Uruguay (or probably even of the Netherlands [EDIT: Nope, but close. There are roughly 400,000 US boys playing high school soccer. The entire 15-19 male population of the Netherlands is roughly 500,000]), and I guarantee there's more cumulative athletic talent in it as well. (Oh, and by the way, the gap between the high school aged participation rates in soccer as compared to football, which would have been 10:1 or more in the 80s, is only a little over 2:1 today. And looking at the last 40 years of trend data, soccer will pass baseball in HS boys participation in roughly 10 years.) Which is. . . what? I look around the soccer world, as opposed to the NFL, and I don't see a disproportionate number of black players at the top of it. There certainly have been black players who were at some point the best, like Pele, Ronaldinho, Drogba. But not to the extent that it crowds out others; we as Americans bring that bias over from watching other sports. Even if by race we really mean class--Kaka didn't grow up poor. Cesc Fabregas didn't grow up poor. Jurgen Klinsmann didn't grow up poor. Even Messi didn't grow up poor per se. He was pretty 'blue collar', as was David Beckham, but he grew up with most of his basic needs met. Wayne Rooney and Zinedine Zidane (who is African by descent but most don't consider him 'black') grew up in housing projects, and the wealth distribution probably does skew to the lower brackets, but not to the extent that you can say that the top prospects necessarily come from the ghetto.
When Americans say 'athletic', their culture-trained bias tends to mean three things: how much you can bench press, how fast you can run the 40, and how high you can jump. (Usually in that order.) I agree that endurance, agility and reaction time are three real athletic traits, but they're not what most Americans mean when they say 'if the best athletes played soccer.'
My thought on this is that if the best physical athletes in terms of measurables played soccer rather than football or basketball, then out of that enormous pool of athletic talent...some of them would also have those other qualities and we would find more superstars. They might not be the same exact guys that became superstars in other sports, but there would be a number of world class players in the bunch. How could there not be? Hell, out of all the cornerbacks in the NFL in the last 25 years, you'd have to think at least a few of them would have also had the touch, vision, toughness, movement, and field sense to make a truly great soccer player had they been raised in the game, watched it from a young age, etc.
Be careful saying such things. There are those on these boards who would consider such statements as heresy. But, I agree with you. A lot of people lose sight of the fact that if soccer were more ingrained in this country that athletes would train more specifically for it. Those 200 pound 6 footers would be more like 170-180 pounds. Our super stars would look more like Alan Iverson, Maurice Jones-Drew and Brandon Jennings than Kobe, Lebron and Tom Brady.
I keep hearing this kid's name thrown out there, but has he expressed any interest in playing for the USA? How do we know he's not going to declare for Spain? *is a bit skeptical.*
If he ended up with a hot Norwegian mother like Kristen Brekken, maybe. Seriously though, of course, more talent in the hopper means a greater chance of finding a breakthrough quality of a player ... but ... the return on investment, as it were, would be much greater if the guys presently available were actually coached by the international quality managers for the period of 4-6 years. This was posted on an old Michael Bradley game thread from December, 10, 2007 (yes, about five years ago) by feyenoordsoccerfan. https://www.bigsoccer.com/community/...veen-fc-groningen.630219/page-7#post-13426388 I left the typos in just to make sure I am quoting the original (I took the Cobi Jones part out but everyone can read the full post in the above link)
Chad Barret has no touch around the area and zero instincts around the area. In a proper system he would have been told to lose weight and converted to a central midfielder. Clint Dempsey is the Jerry Rice of american soccer: a slow guy with an incredible will to improve and an uncanny ability to read the game.
At best he's going to be a Spanish citizen around 23 years of age if memory serves. The only competition at the moment I believe is perhaps Israel.
Yup. That's the thing that bothers me. People keep saying "athletic" as if there were one kind of athleticism. Balance, the innate ability to predict trajectories, stamina, hand-eye coordination, peripheral vision... These are also athletic abilities. Straight-line speed, vertical jump, and upper body strength are only part of it. Different positions within different sports reward different kinds of athleticism. Yes, most NFL speed guys are faster over 100m than most soccer players. But they're faster over 100m than most NBA players too. Football rewards pure raw, straight-line speed in a way that probably no other sport except track does. That's why so many speedy football players run track to improve their speed and why football teams recruit sprinters from the track team. But there's no reason to think that particular athletic gift would make those guys athletically gifted by NBA standards (not tall enough, not able to jump enough, not able to change direction enough, not good enough shooting from outside, whatever). And there's no particular reason to think that gift would make them gifted by soccer standards. In fact, there's good reason to think that it probably wouldn't. For starters, there's endurance. There's a reason most 100m champions don't win the 800m and vice versa. And soccer players have to have very good endurance of a particular kind that neither 100m nor 800m runners need--the ability to run for much of 90 minutes with few breaks, and to change pace from a walk to a trot to a sprint to a run many, many times per game while also changing directions frequently. Compared to other sports, the thing that makes Donovan or Messi or Ronaldo or whoever exceptional as athletes isn't that they have Olympic 100m speed or marathoner's endurance. It's that they can go from a standstill to high speed quite fast AND sprint for 50m quite fast AND do so over and over again for 90 minutes AND turn on a dime while running. Ronaldo and Messi are exceptional because they can do all that while also keeping a soccer ball under very close control with their feet. Part of that control is learned technique, but part of it is a particular kind of body control that few people are born with. Some NFL or NBA players might have all those abilities. But not too many, I'd guess. Just like not too many NBA players have all the physical qualifications that would allow them to play in the NFL and vice versa. As others have pointed out, the challenge of our development program is to identify the guys who do have the athletic abilities that make for great SOCCER players but choose to play other sports anyway.