It's possible, but soccer and sports in general has evolved to where you almost have to be a super athlete to succeed. Better to be at least 5'8 5'9. Any smaller and you have to be insanely technical to overcome it at high levels.
He's a super technical player who is quick, and smart as hell. If Sullivan or Alcala are that talented then size won't matter as much.
Luka Modric **is** a super athlete. Albeit the 36 year old version less so. Being a super athlete in soccer just looks so different than other sports, and it's significantly less obvious to the eye. It's not like basketball or football where if a guy isn't tall enough or strong enough it's a huge hindrance. There's certainly a little bit of that in soccer, but the biggest thing in soccer is some combination of speed and work capacity. Luka Modric might be 150 lbs soaking wet, but he's pretty good on that metric. And by pretty good I mean "pretty good by the standards of elite soccer athletes." The question when you're talking about projecting a 12 year old soccer player isn't whether he'll be tall enough or strong enough, or even fast enough. It's whether, 10 years from now, he's going to be able to run around a field for 90 minutes with 19 elite athletes and still be able to play soccer decently while doing it. And running around a field with a bunch of 14 year olds provides almost no evidence for whether they'll be able to do that.
The "super athletes" within the context of top soccer players are guys like Mbappe and Haaland. Modric has never approached anything like that. My point is that the greatest players are quite often not especially athletic within their peer group and also often small and relatively weak. But they have attributes (mostly technical and mental) that allow them to outperform bigger and more athletic players. Xavi and Pirlo are others who come to mind. Great athletes relative to the rest of the world. But certainly not within their peer group.
It's probably helpful to break down athleticism into different areas. The physical attribute that is actually most common across high level athletes in basically every sport? Vision. Not like, passing vision, but like 20/20 vision. What people usually mean, though, is size, speed and quickness. And often, but not always, coordination. Because coordination is so tied to skill, players like compete more on skill than size and speed, like Modric, are actually super athletic in this sense. Every sport has them -- basketball is probably the most athletically dependent, and they have Steph Curry. Every sport has guys who are a bit smaller or slower than others. To call them unathletic, you have to remove coordination. But if you do, relative skill sports like baseball and soccer have more of these guys than basketball or American football. But the best players are absolutely a combination. Messi's not big, but the dude is fast and quick. Ronaldo. Van Dyke. Salah. I'm not actually sure how this relates to Cavan Sullivan. The kid is 12. His brother is 5'11" and pretty athletic. I don't think he's going to end up 5'2" and slow or something.
Well the dream is that a player has it all. The soccer IQ plus the coordination and balance plus the high end pure athleticism. The American that comes closest is Gio. We'll see how it ends up for him, but I think he by far has the highest upside of any American player ever. I don't think I'll see another Gio in my lifetime, but I'm hoping for a few more that approach Pulisic or McKennie. Right now I'd say Cavan is the one that is most likely to be in that class. And he has a non-negligible chance of surpassing them. He won't surpass Gio.
His cousin is freaking Chris Albright who was so athletic that no soccer abilities were needed to get on MNT.
Yeah. Chris even made a world cup squad without knowing how to play soccer. He was a mystery to me. I watched him play for DC United as a rookie. Every fifth game he would flash a moment of promise but it would quickly flicker out. Then someone moved him to defense and he was ok there. Sort of. I also watched him play in the Olympic Qualifying Tourney in Hershey. He and Connor Casey were the forwards. They were a very athletic pairing, but little came of their efforts. The rest of the team was pretty good. JOB. Very young Donovan and Beasley. Wolff. I think Olsen.
I would argue that if you consider "athleticism" for a given sport to be basically "how good they are" minus "how skilled they are" (and I suppose subtract out soccer IQ as well, but that's even harder to extricate from the rest), the super athlete is Ngolo Kante, and it's not even particularly close. But in the context of this discussion I don't think that's the point. The guys who are outliers within the ranks of professional soccer players aren't that relevant, the point is the guy who looks completely average out there on the pitch in a top 5 league pitch is a physical freak beyond all reason. The point is that a kid who's 12 doesn't just have to be skilled and have great vision and leadership qualities and yada yada yada, they also have to grow up to be some variety of physical freak. If they don't, they're not going to allowed on the field. Maybe if they're one of the 5 most skilled guys on the planet. Maybe not even then.
I guess even if we take the "but Luka Modric" thing literally -- and there's always one guy; it used to be "but Xavi" -- it's not that convincing. Like, ah, you don't have to be a super athletic...as long as you're one of the most absurdly skilled players in the world. OK!
Yeah, pick a random kid who is dominating as a 12 year old in absolutely anyway, they're much more likely to grow up to be Mbappe or Haaland than they are to grow up to be Xavi or Scholes. It seems somehow intuitively more likely to grow up to be Xavi because we all know for sure that we would never be able to be 6'4 and run really fast. Xavi just shows up and plays football really well. I too feel like I could show up and play football really well if only I had the ability to play football really well. But obviously I don't, no one does. The reality is it's no different than being 6'4 -- you can starve a kid at age 3 and make it so he can't be 6'4. But you can't give a 3 year old a lot of food and make it so he will be 6'4. That's what we do in America, we starve kids of football training so they won't grow up to be Xavi no matter what. But that doesn't mean if a random kid isn't starved he'll grow up to be Xavi.
Cavan Sullivan is back with Borussia Dortmund Philadelphia Union's 12-year-old Cavan Sullivan is on trial at Borussia Dortmund 👀 pic.twitter.com/uppMi0xTD9— USMNT Only (@usmntonly) May 21, 2022
Playing with Dortmunds 07 age group in a tournament. Shoutout and best of luck to my little brother @sullivan_cavan . He is playing in the in the Kevin De Bruyne Cup in Belgium with the 2007 Dortmund team, equivalent to the UCL for youth teams. Link to check out the teams involved: https://t.co/aqGNIe9L1O . Good luck, homie. pic.twitter.com/qJfJvBKPA2— Quinn Sullivan (@QuinnSullivan33) May 27, 2022
https://kdbcup.be/en/matches/ You can watch these games if you have a Veo account. KDB Cup games are 40 min. They lost to Man City in 1-0 in the first game Cavan started the 2nd half and did not look out of place. It took him all of 10 mins to adjust. He played behind the front 3 and I stand behind my Rooney comparison- he's putting in tackles all over the field and yelling at his forwards for not making runs.. The kid's a baller. As expected, this level is a few steps up from the u15 MLS Next. He had a chance to tie it up with the last kick of the game but the bouncing ball would not come down quick enough and his shot just went over the bar..
I downloaded the Veo Live app. It’s free and all the matches are recorded. They don’t provide lineups, numbers or subs so I really had no idea who Cavan was. I did hear his teammates yelling his name a couple times. @Dynamo Kev is right: that last second equalizer would’ve been awesome. Looked like he let it come down and tried to shoot on the outside of his left foot. Hell of an attempt.