It makes me think of a quote from Laugh In “very interesting….but stupid” I believe it was Henry Gibson’s character. Some of you will have to Google it to have any idea of what I am talking about
Here's some debunking of the "until our best athletes choose soccer over ____" myth: This is an insane take, because pulisic is 5’10” (178 cm) and can dunk a basketball (vid in next tweet), which requires a 30-35 inch (75-90 cm) vertical jump— the *low end* of which is something that less than 1% of the general population, and approximately 5% of professional… https://t.co/O4Q28P2j5P— 💟Ole IS Right, Esq. (@Ole_is_right) March 10, 2026
I suspect the general sports fan in this country, who only casually pays attention to soccer......................vastly underestimates the athletic ability of soccer players. Do people understand or appreciate what a guy like Brenden Aaronson is doing every game? Probably not. If any of us mortals tried to keep up with Brenden Aaronson out there, we'd die out quickly. Get an NFL wide receiver out there and see if they can do what Brenden Aaronson does. We'd probably be surprised.
When he moved to LAFC on loan, Stephen Eustaquio got his salary doubled. And he was playing at Porto! Financially it's inevitable that some of our best players are going to stick around in or return to MLS.
Can't blame them, they're in it for the money. If your trajectory reached it's top in the Portuguese league and you can double the pay by leaving, you're a fool to stay.
In the most popular sports in the US you generally need size. When Americans talk athleticism it is usually height/speed ratio or weight/speed ratio. In soccer there is the occasional Erling Haaland or Micky van de ven but when soccer talks athleticism it is more about stamina. Someone Tyler Adams would look extremely small at an NFL combine but he has the ideal athleticism for high level soccer.
I could dunk in my 20s, I’m certainly not one of the country’s “best athletes”. Pulisic is a great soccer athlete but people have skewed ideas of what that looks like.
It's just one leg of a 3 legged stool. Best athletes with parents who played at a high level that spent some part of their childhood in the youth setup of European countries. Get on it USYouth/USClub...
Many of our best athletes choose other sports. A professional soccer player playing at UCL level, or any high level league, is a top athlete.
I think the measure of athleticism is different in soccer compared to the most popular sports in North America. Steve Nash was considered unathletic compared to other NBA stars, but he has one of the highest recorded beep scores. Wayne Gretzky was considered underwhelming in terms of size and speed, but one time they tested his cardio, and he did so well that they thought the machine was broken. When soccer players talk about athleticism, often they talk more about cardio than they do about size or speed. Guys like Roy Keane, Gennaro Gattuso, Owen Hargreaves, Park Ji Sung, N'Golo Kante, etc are talked about as some of the most impressive players athletically, but none of them are physically imposing. Like if you brought together some NFL WRs and CBs, NBA PGs, and the US soccer team to do athletic testing. The NFL guys would probably have the fastest 40 times. The basketball players would probably have the best vertical jumps, but the soccer players would probably have the best VO2 max.
This could be chicken vs. egg, but the US does plenty well at sprinting, and there's a lot of exposure and attention on those track events. There's not nearly as much attention paid to the longer endurance races. Now, maybe that's because the US isn't dominant in them, but I think the "general audience" in the US tends to enjoy explosive athletic sports over long, sustained endurance sports.
The US is very competitive at distance running. Back in the 70s, before doping was a thing, track was prime time viewing and runners like Steve Prefontaine and Mary Decker were household names. But there is a sentiment (I'm not saying it's real) that the best athletes play football or basketball and the rest play soccer or run distance. Again I'm not saying it's reality.
The eyeballs and money are in football, basketball, sprinting, etc. And the top distance runners (e.g the guys running the marathons) are usually not American. We've done well in some Olympic events, but being "competitive" =/= serial winning. The real question is how well the US would do if all the money, eyeballs, and cultural relevance of football/basketball were transplanted onto soccer. It doesn't guarantee that the US would win any World Cups, but we'd be much better, that's for sure.
I think there's way more money in distance running than sprinting. The US has traditionally dominated sprinting for the same reason as it's women dominated soccer: NCAA.
The key is getting the right athletes, more than what most Americans would consider the best athletes. In the US, the biggest youth sport is basketball. It is the most accessible sport and the most potentially lucrative sport. A lot of guys on the US national team's second sport was basketball. The NFL is filled with guys whose first love was basketball. If you are an athletic 16-year-old who devoted most of your childhood to basketball but lacks the height, body type, skill level, etc to play basketball at a high level, if you have the right body type, you can easily transfer that athleticism to football. If you are an athletic 16-year-old who is agile, has great cardio, and devoted most of your childhood to basketball, you could only transfer it to soccer if you were also already a high-level soccer player. I am probably highly oversimplifying it; in a place like France, the biggest sport is soccer. It is the most accessible and the most potentially lucrative. I assume almost everyone starts with soccer. And the really tall guys go to basketball, volleyball, or handball(except Isaak Toure). The bulky guys go to Rugby. And the guys who can run but are not the most skillful go to track.
France was never considered a soccer nation. National sporting pride was really more around rugby, tennis, cycling etc. Soccer had hotbeds in industrial towns like St Etienne, Reims and Nantes and cosmopolitan ports like Marseille and Nice. Paris didn't have a competitive team until the 1980s. Soccer became popular in the Platini era following the success of the national team and of French players in Italy and Spain. But generally in Europe soccer is accessible. Wherever you find an open space you'll find kids kicking a ball around improvising or playing some version of the game someone invented decades ago. It's like basketball in the US. If you see a basketball net in England you'll find kids trying to lob or head a soccer ball into it.
And...the best French soccer players come from ONE Parish subburb or neighbourhood. Edit: Article on it from NOS Football• Thursday, 20 June 2024, 06:23: https://nos.nl/artikel/2525336-oors...es-ligt-in-parijse-banlieues-wij-zijn-dromers Origin of French football success lies in Parisian banlieues: 'We are dreamers' If the Netherlands faces title favorite France tomorrow evening (21:00), this is what the Dutch have to fear: the willpower of the dreamers. Even though one of those dreamers, who this story is about, may be temporarily disabled due to a broken nose. Four years ago, Kylian Mbappé wrote a story in The Players' Tribune entitled: 'A letter to the young Kylians'. He was 22 at the time. The footballer played for Paris Saint-Germain. Had won the World Cup (2018) with France at the age of 19. He addressed the letter to children growing up in the poorest suburbs of Paris. Just like he had done. "This story is about football," Mbappé wrote. "But actually it's about dreams."
Mbappe - with a Cameroonian father and Algerian mother - lived for football. Like Saliba, Mbappé played in the youth of AS Bondy, the local football club. His father was a coach there. "Football was everything to me," said Mbappé. Bondy belongs to the French department 93, 'quatre-vingt-treize', or Seine-Saint-Denis. On small tight fields between the buildings, children learn the ultimate ball control. Kylian Mbappé briefly back at AS Bondy, where he played as a little boy, with his father Wilfried Mbappé (r) The Île-de-France region - the area around Paris - supplied 33 players who played in the Champions League last season, Sky Sports calculated.
I picked France because, off the top of my head, I knew they had a lot of success in other team sports. They recently won medals in basketball, volleyball, and handball. And I assume they are decent in Rugby because they are one of the teams in the six nations championship. But I can also use Spain since they have won the World Cup and Euros in basketball. They are also strong in Handball. Or Germany, who have also won the Euros and World Cup in basketball, are of the major powers in Handball and is decent in Ice Hockey. And accessibility is the biggest issue in American soccer; it is the biggest limiter in American soccer. And every sport in youth American sports is getting more expensive. Even the most accessible sport, basketball, is becoming less accessible. MLS helps a little bit with having free academies, but what about the non-MLS academy MLS next clubs? And even in a World where non-MLS academy teams can get solidarity payments as they do in Europe, those clubs will find getting thousands of dollars a year from parents is a much more reliable income stream than that.
School is where kids play most of their organized soccer. By accessibility I meant going to a flat space with a soccer call the way kids in US cities go to a basketball court. There aren't thousands of free academies in Europe and only the elite get picked up by club academies.
There's a bit of exaggeration here. Football has always been the number 1 sport even long before the Platini era, except during the three weeks of the Tour de France, and with the exception of the South West of France where rugby is more popular.