If the best American athletes are not getting into soccer, a true statement. Then tell me how a NBA player, NFL WR, baseball player etc talent would translate into soccer? How would Dwayne Wade athletc skills translate into being a good soccer player? Besides the fact Wade is 6'4 How would a WR with 4.3 speed in the 40, translate that into being a good soccer player? How would a Jimmy Rollins or a young Rickey Henderson's talent translate into being a good soccer player?
Nobody is arguing that our national team would become better if we took all the players from the NBA, MLB and NFL and put them in the pool. They're saying that if all of the kids that later becamse NBA/MLB/NFLers had focused on soccer instead that our pool would be better and more athletic than it is now. How would a WR with 4.3 speed in the 40 be if he had played soccer since his youth with as much passion as he devoted to (American) football? Couldn't hurt our national team to find out.
I see the weekly athletism thread has made it to the show. Soccer takes a different athletic ability than the big American sports. It almost takes a marathon runner's body. You don't see many ripped marathon runners. That 40m speed doesn't mean much in soccer either since it's usually way different with a ball on your feet. You get some exceptions, like Henry or Ronaldinho. But then you get Beasley and Rommadahl. Guys who are mega fast usually but can't do anything with the ball in traffic.
We do however often do get exceptional athletes like Marvell Wynne and Chris Wondolowski, and yet they still don't usually measure up to the world's stars. Given our lax instruction, I can't think of a single U.S. athlete that would be a world class player had he grown up in our soccer system. Not one. Athleticism is a huge part of this game, but only a part and a part I think we're already more competitive in than other aspects of the game.
Umm I know what they are talking about. Of course, I meant if DWade had grown up playing soccer how would he do? If if the pool is more athletic doesn't always mean better. The NBA is much more athletic than the Magic-Bird era but it's not even close in basketball skill level. Somebody brought up Wynne. His father was a decent baseball player. Wynne went to one of the top college soccer programs in the nation and he still not a world class soccer player?
If we had no other sports, just soccer and those kids who played baskeball growing up had no chioce but to concentrate on soccer, we would have a team like brazil... if guys with the same drive as kobe bryant or kevin garnett had practiced juggling instead of their shot we would be awesome... i think basektball is the only sport that is taking potential soccer players away from us... it takes the same kind of determined technical practice as well as desire to get out of poverty.
This thread, like all of its many predecessors, is strange. If the argument is about the benefits of poverty for creating professional athletes, then there's no use mixing that up with discussions of African-Americans. More than 70% of U.S families that are below the poverty line are not African-American. Including 25% who are Hispanic, and who therefore are already likely to be avid soccer players. http://www.prb.org/AmeristatTemplat...tManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7873 If the argument about poverty is instead a cover for a race-based argument about the superiority of African-heritage athletes for winning World Cups, somebody needs to inform Germany, Italy, Portugal, and 50% of the France roster that they are deluded in believing that they have advanced to the World Cup semifinals. We have more rich white kids in our youth soccer system than Germany, more middle-class white kids, more poor white kids, more African-Americans of any income, more Hispanic players of any income, more Asian players of any income, and I daresay more Inuits, too. Yet Germany has advanced to its second consecutive World Cup semis while we are once again watching.
although I don't watch the US Sports, none of those athletes have much experiece with a ball at their boots. So however high they jump or fast they run, it won't translate into a good footballer. However, I think the yanks have good keepers because of their talents in other sports. The problem with the US soccer is that their is no youth system like you see in Europe or South America. And again you have TOO MANY SPORTS!
Let's try to analyze this from a different perspective... Doesn't Brazil have a good basketball team? If so, then why don't these Brazilian athletes tryout for soccer in their country? Do not some European countries have great basketball teams? After all, they have been beating their American counterparts for the past few years now... right?. The USA's best basketball athletes have been losing to Europe's best basketball athletes. And yet, why don't we see these European basketball athletes try out for soccer in Europe? Why aren't Europe's top soccer teams filled with basketball giants? Think about this for a moment... The USA's best basketball athletes have been losing to Europe's best basketball athletes, and yet, you won't find these European athletes in Europe's top soccer teams! Why is that? Could it be that top athletes in one sport do not necessarily translate to top achievement in another sport?
if we had a youth system that took all kids who had the correct characteristics to become professional athletes (desire, willingness to put in the time, athletic , etc....) away from all the other sports, we would have one of the best teams in the world... if we could guide their progress from an early age towards soccer, those characteristics would kick in and give us more than what the rest of the world has, of course they don't translate directly.. a kid has to grow up with it, and of course guys like Shaq would struggle with soccer, but guys who are more fit and technical would have thrived on it. I wish the US would still send its real best basketballers to these international competitions...
The team we sent to the last Olympics were close to who we _think_ are our best. Of course many people _think_ Allen Iverson is and he clearly isn't. He is an average at best NBA player, and that's only because of his defense. The common thread I think is that the European player development method does a much more efficient job of instructing players in the more advanced aspects of the various sports. So you wind up with immensely talented basketball players like Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury who are unfortunately sorely lacking in the ability to do some of the things required of professional guards to win basketball games. It doesn't help that when it comes to NBA statistics, the press obsesses over points per game and ignores the infinitely more important statistics like adjusted field goal percentage.
Allen Iverson is a thug and a good example of what us soccer needs to become... we need kids growing up thinking it is cool to play soccer. As a teacher, I remember the tougher kids make fun of one of their friends when he was trying to kick the ball around. Peer pressure is ruining soccer in the US!!!
These threads exist because the US is still gaining new soccer fans. These fans don't know anything about the sport, but are welcome to learn. In the course of learning, they inevitably fall back on what they know (as any person would do). They only know the popular sports they grew up watching. Also, if you listen to talk radio or read the sports opinion columns, you'll notice that most of the direct attacks against soccer have died down. In their place, we see vieled attacks such as "too bad US Soccer don't have the best athletes such as NFL or NBA players, otherwise we'd be much better." It sounds like these people care about our success, but I think some of them are still just as biased as before but their editors and/or sponsors don't want to hear them be so blatant about it anymore. So this is the new trendy (and relatively weak) anti-soccer meme that is floating around these days. I'm not going to engage in these discussions any more because inevitably someone will cite NFL players' muscles and ability to run a 40-yard sprint and associate that with soccer skills. It is like saying these guys could also hit a tennis ball, play golf, or swing a baseball bat merely because of their physical attributes. They are used to seeing brute athleticism passed off as skill and also are not able to appreciate all the intricate technique that goes into playing soccer at a high level. It is impossible to argue with them, and only time spent with the sport of soccer will change their minds. - Paul
at the high school level, soccer gets crapped on, we get the kids who are playing because they want to have fun or because their friends are playing, even if they grew up playing soccer and have reasonably good skill. The passion that the other sports have (as well as the support) catapult them way past us... especially the level of athlete they have (and I don't mean physicality... I mean their mental ability and characteristics that help them become the strongest and fastest). If the other sport's bigger, faster athletes were given to soccer, we would be more competitve, but we would still need those elusive skills... that's the importance of a youth system. If our superstars today had grown up with a soccer ball, those characteristics and that passion that led them to be great at other sports would have done the same in the soccer. but, of course, we can't go back in time and do that... so those players obviously have only one specialty and will only have one specialty.
This thread is crap, we've been through it hundred times, yes Team USA would be ebtter if more people played soccer, but it's unlikely that the current crop of US sportstars would've made it as soccer stars. It's already been mentioned, but Darren Campbell was a promisng young sprinter and also a good soccer player. As a junior he was among the best sprinetres in the world, but (partly due to injury) he quit sprinting in order to become a professional football player, but he had a pretty unremarkable career playing only in the fourth tier of English soccer and the welsh league (which isn't good as all the decent Welsh players from a young age paly for English teams or the 3 Welsh teams that play in the English professional leagues). After his unremarkable career he went back to spriting and among other things won a 4x100m Olympic gold and a 200m Olympic silver. If you think a basketball player has more drive than a soccer player then you're crazy. Rememebr a lot more people around the world play soccer than basketball, to become among the bets in thw world is a lot harder because you've got a lot more competition.
Yup. Also, there are 10x as many people with West African heritage who play soccer as there are those who play football, baseball, and basketball combined. So next time you hear about soccer being revolutionized once the real athletes enter the sport, think about that one for a bit. The reverse is actually true -- if all the world's bigtime athletes played football and basketball, most of the existing NFL and NBA player would be driven out of the sport.
Also thinking more about it to play basketball professioanlly is almost impossible unless you're getting towards being freakishly tall (yes I know there's a few outliers). When you add in the balance of height needed to the equation there's not that many players seriously competing to become top basketball players.
if we have so many, what is stopping them from playing soccer past their youth? maybe they realize there is no money in it here.
the USMNT is athletic. Just small athletic, not even medium. Other countries are medium and large athletic. I would consider most of our pro football and basketball players as large to extra-large athletic. On another point, isn't it ironic that many say we don't have kids growing up with the individual skills and flair yet our basketball team gets beaten on the international scene by fundamentals?
Because the fundamentals of Futbol are what you learn while playing pickup. The tactics are coached, the fundamentals are self taught. In order to learn to trap a ball, all you need is to kick it against a wall, no need for some fifth generation soccer guru to tell you how. The best one I heard about the "best US athletes" not playing Futbol was "man, imagine AI as a midfielder", to which I replied "i don't need to, there's DMB". Stupidy knows no bounds.
Dutch, I tend to agree but... AI is 4 inches taller and 40 pounds heavier that DMB and that was my original point of the US being small and athletic.
there seems to be no reason why we couldn't be large and athletic... we have that body type flourishing in america... if we could get them to love soccer enough to grow up wanting skills then we could have a team full of drogbas, kanus, and flos
Then why don't we get our best tap dancers or those Riverdance dancers, whose footwork is even more intricate. Then why don't these WRs join the US Track & Field teams? Or better, why don't we get our fastest Track & Field athletes into soccer? Think about that for a moment.