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U.S. eliminated from 2018 World Cup

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by LongTimeListener, Oct 10, 2017.

  1. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    God, this is so much more interesting than property foreclosures.

    But, fuck, I have to get working.

    Later, taters.
     
  2. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Do you think there aren't differences around the world?

    The average kid, growing up poor in a developing country isn't going to be 6' tall.

    In Denmark, 6' isn't anything. Until recently, it was rare in China or Japan.

    The world's diet is catching up to ours.

    But, there's a reason why Germany and Norway put out teams that are, on average, taller than Spain or Argentina.
     
  3. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    I think it's an enormous problem. It's probably the only thing everyone agrees on (not just here but in the entire soccer community), pay-to-play will forever hold the U.S. back. (As a side note, this is also true: Our American soccer establishment has taught kids to play fair and not too rough, and our suburban superteams do not like running up against the Mexican-flavor teams that go for the shins. There's a cultural divide there that plays out at tournaments all over the nation every weekend.)

    The lack of connection to immigrant communities is part of the overall lack of connection to where the best prospects are, though.

    If Germany suddenly decided soccer sucks (concussions!) and sent all of its best athletes into the basketball pipeline, wouldn't they be a hell of a lot better at basketball? It's the same thing here. If we sent our best athletes into soccer, we'd be a hell of a lot better at soccer.

    As to two-sport athletes, there are a ton of them up to the high school level. A few in college, but the time demands and coach preferences get in the way. Rarely there's even a guy who does it at the pro level. I know for sure there are way more U.S. athletes who have gone pro in two sports than there are European soccer players who have also doubled up.
     
  4. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    I'm not sure this is inarguable. Let's start with two stipulations: 1) Soccer is very much like basketball in that, as a sport grounded in what we might call "practiced improvisation," to play it very well one must have spent countless thousands of hours playing it; and 2) We don't really know what athletic skill-set (size, speed, etc.) a kid is going to have until that kid is well along his athletic journey.

    Because the U.S. is so biased toward other sports, many otherwise viable soccer players will have, by the time it's clear they don't have what it takes body-wise to be a top-echelon baseball, basketball or football player, foregone those thousands of formative hours.

    An n=1 "case study" to illustrate what I'm getting at. A golf acquaintance of mine, his son was a fabulous athlete. Fast, coordinated, etc., etc. From the day he first stepped onto a football field, I'm sure, he was the best player on the field. I know that by the time he was in high school, he was a two-way starter (QB and cornerback) at a big city school in which two-way players are very, very rare. However ... although his father was about 6'1", the son turned out to be only about 5'9".

    He wound up walking on as a QB at @tapintoamerica's favorite institution of higher education, edged his way up to 3rd on the depth chart, but then hurt his knee. After going through through rehab, he was encouraged to focus on playing cornerback. He just got within spitting distance of some regular playing time before hurting his other knee, and at that point he gave up the sport. Looking for an outlet, he took up golf and was, within two years of taking up the sport, a scratch golfer. He actually played on a couple of mini-tours and cashed a few small checks.

    Now of course no one knows whether he would have been a good soccer player had he focused on the sport from his earliest days. But his journey is completely typical for a lot of otherwise very athletic kids in the U.S.: Ridiculous gifts, "betrayed" by genetics at a very late hour. It would not, therefore, surprise me at all to find that U.S. soccer really doesn't have all that big (relatively) a pool from which to draw.
     
    LongTimeListener likes this.
  5. CD Boogie

    CD Boogie Well-Known Member

    How many tall people are soccer quick? Not many. If height were an advantage over quickness, the soccer folks would have figured it out a long time ago.
     
  6. Hermes

    Hermes Well-Known Member

    It took us like 150 years to figure out that you should hit a baseball in the air, not on the ground.
     
    LongTimeListener likes this.
  7. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Yeah ... I'm not so sure that the "ideal" soccer body has been definitely established. Well, other than we know that it's "not @doctorquant's" ...
     
    I Should Coco likes this.
  8. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    When you say stuff like "soccer fans" what you really mean is "people in my Facebook feed who posted that Wetzel column." That small sample size tailored to you does not make it a broad view of "soccer fans." I think most soccer fans agree with my first statement, just not that 6-foot-8 inch LeBron James would have been a great soccer player if he'd chosen soccer at age 5. (Only trolls and fools agree with the second, that we could fix our soccer woes by the next World Cup with USC's back-up receivers.) It's unknowable to imagine LeBron' soccer destiny, but it might also help to concede that there are many, many really tall and athletic men in West African nations where James could likely trace his ansectral roots back to, and a lot of those nations play soccer, and we've never seen a trancendent soccer player who is 6-foot-8. Why is that? Are the tall and fast guys in Ghana or Cameroon just choosing to be bad basketball players instead? Why don't they realize they could dominate the sport of their home country? After all, they share almost the same ancestral DNA as many American NBA players who could trace their roots back to slave ships bought over to this country 300 years ago.
     
    Donny in his element likes this.
  9. Stoney

    Stoney Well-Known Member

    This. It's so obvious. The only two countries genuinely interested in football are also the two most underachieving countries in soccer.

    Gee, no connection there. Just a big ole coincidence.
     
  10. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    China has no interest in American football, six times the US population, and is quite bad at men's soccer. Why?
     
  11. Hermes

    Hermes Well-Known Member

    Too many tall guys.
     
  12. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    I suspect this is a VERY big part of why the U.S. is limited in its efforts to develop a better international program.

    Someone brought up Germany, and the difference in population size there and here. But I think what is more relevant is what the actual populations are focused on.

    This is telling to me: Germany's three major soccer leagues take in something like $4 to $5 billion a year. It's really the only major sport in Germany. And if you are the typical kid growing up in Germany, you are playing that one sport to the exclusion of others.

    By contrast, MLS does about 1/7 of the revenue that the NHL does. And in the U.S.. the NHL is behind the NFL, NBA and MLB. People in the U.S. are focused on other sports. And kids in the U.S. are not growing up tethered to a soccer ball the way kids in Germany are.

    You can put together a development program and work hard to create a culture for the sport, but you can't dictate people's preferences to them.
     
    Inky_Wretch likes this.
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