I am just curious about why are we the only country in the world ( yes, the only country i said) that obsesses with statistic like, score 100 goals of the career, how many cap for a players throughout of her/his career, how many assist etc etc ... i think what happen on the field is the most important thing, and it doesn't matter how many cap and career goals of a player if she/he plays good on the field and scoring goals, that something that will make fans happy, not the statistic. No offense to Milbrett or others, but, scoring against minow teams is not worth to be added to the statistic, and it doesn't change the fact that she is The Tiffeny Milbrett which eventhough IF she only scores 99, she still a great player.
Its not just the US, though it may be just the English rooted and the Americas... It was "important" for a while that Rocket Richard and Boom Boom Geoffrion were the only players with 50 goal seasons in NHL history for example, and Ed Figueruoa had something aobut being the only guy from somehwere with 20 win season in MLB... Dennis Martinez played some extra time in order to break the career win record for Latin American pitchers... I believe career cricket stats have import in Britain? And of course boxers' career results are a regular part of their thumbnails and introductions... I don't doubt that it is more prevalent here than there; but there are perhaps a couple of obvious reasons for it. The development of the sports pages and the baseball box score went pretty much hand in hand here; baseball lends itself naturally to the accumulation of statistical records, and in hometown newspaper archives the numbers were available to anyone who really cared. Once the sports reporter has learned to go to the "number pile" for a certain part of his annual copy inches, the habit transfers easily when he's moved to the golf beat or given the World Cup assignment, and there you are... I was told by a friend who spent quite a while in China in the 70's that the newspapers there covered the statistical achievements of an iron worker who had exceeded his quota every day for 25 years or something, in the same way that American newspapers cover sports; so perhaps the impulse is universal but the marriage to sports is accidental and "regional"?
100 caps is considered a big milestone in the men's game anywhere in the world. No man will ever score 100 international goals or get 200 caps since they spend most of their time playing for their professional clubs. The US stands out from the rest of the world by obsessing over much dumber stats than this, like 'catches/punches', 'blocks', making a 'point system' for goals/assists, etc.
I agree with the statistic only IF they are not compared one to the other's because it all depens on : how many games the player played, what kind of quality of the opponents or in other word the quality of goals. Like the italian player (the one who was next to Mia Hamm on the all time goal scorer)must've scored against minow teams before because the quality teams were lower than this time around.
But this is part and parcel of understanding what the record at issue actually is; the Babe Ruth record that Roger Maris broke was for a single season, not 154 games... I'd have to look it up but its dollars to donuts that when the Babe acquired the record-- I think it was Ned Williamson's-- it was from a player who played in 134 games or less... no asterisk was necessary or appropriate... Likewise we are keeping track of "Goals scored in international play," not "goals scored that we are proud of." If the other team's the Ukraine, so what? Anyone who scores for San Marino has done so in a very difficult context, because everybody's bigger than they are... should we count those goals double? Or triple? All it is is a bag with objects sorted a certain way in it. If you want to look at different objects, sort out a subset...