@iunorth perfectly stated. @dbmhoosier north's post is spot on. that's the superbowl winner's kid. he's a phenomenal athlete. but his touch is shit. i firmly believe you could say we are banning football baseball and basketball and every kid born for the next five years has to play soccer. i don't think we'd be any better. just more redundant players. whatever creates ronaldinho messi maradona zidane xavi iniesta pirlo lamal and on and on we simply do not have in our dna.
Talent athleticism, etc call it whatever you want. We have the talent to win a World Cup. But most of our youth who would be the best soccer players never play soccer.
@co-hoosier nhl is the best league in the world. mlb is the best league in the world. soccer isn't a good comparison. imagine competing with six nhls and none of them are here and some started in the 1800s and the players. and if there's 1.5 million people playing hockey in the world there's 275 million people playing soccer. it ain't easy
But most of our youth who would be the best soccer players never play soccer.
Why would they be the best soccer players? Use your words to explain it so we can record and memorialize your ignorance. below is one of the best to ever do it. he won a world cup. so what about the sport do you think our "best" athletes woudl bring to beat him that he hasn't seen a thousand times. he'd carve up our "best athletes" while rarely moving faster than a slow jog
Are you saying elite level hockey and baseball has better athletes than elite level soccer? I might agree.
@co-hoosier i'm saying the opposite. i'm saying there's barely any competition worldwide in hockey. barely any history. so to be elite in soccer is infinitely more difficult. you have far more history and far more resources and far more people trying to be elite. the top hockey league in the world has 30 arenas with 18,000 people. it doesn't remotely compare to what soccer is worldwide. you have people trying in the suburbs of paris. the jungles of africa. the favelas of brazil.
@bar-down There has to be something about our culture, and some sort of lack of attention to detail, or lack of true connection and buy in with the sport, that makes it different. Basketball is trending away from the US, as the game is becoming more and more skill based, and less athleticism based. But obviously basketball is much more engrained in our culture, and has been for multiple generations.
There's probably some sort of DNA effect too... basketball... a decent chunk of the best of the best, "my dad played D1 this or that", or my dad is Carlos Boozer, or Del Curry... We're probably not deep enough with our soccer lineage for good soccer DNA to have permeated enough.
Having Antonio Freeman as a dad obviously gives Alex some advantages. But he didn't come out able to juggle a soccer ball, I'd bet... like you see from little stinkers in other countries. I'd bet if you track back Messi's family tree, there's a decent amount of high level soccer playing on it, and it probably goes back multiple generations.
Its an easy mistake to make...thinking that someone like Deion Sanders, if he had grown up playing soccer, that he'd be better than guys like Messi. But soccer is much more reliant on skill and touch, than the sports Deion exceled at. Maybe he would have been great? Maybe not?
Belgium has a pop of 12 million. It has almost nothing to do with athleticism.@iunorth I will add that the fact that we have 3 million kids playing is probably illusory. Maybe we have 50,000 really playing. The rest would just be cut anywhere else but here where my generation realized you can make money off these kids that they know by 10 will never be great players. Why stop cashing their checks
There's plenty of talent inside this country to win a World Cup. But the best athletes don't play soccer here. It's a 4th or 5th sport and that isn't changing. It's just too boring.
Look at the first touch and technical ability of the Belgians or other good Euro teams vs the US. The receive the ball delicately and use their first touch to change direction or put defenders off. My favorite part of last night was summed up in one pass. Tyler Adams, a legitimately good player in the Premier Legaue, played an absolutely beautiful 40 yard ball over the top, crossfield, in behind on a plate to Alex Freeman who watched it clunk off his foot over the end line. No pressure on him. Just no ability to control that ball at all.
Tyler Adams just shook his head and laughed. He knew then.
@bar-down Freeman's opportunity on that great run, and pass, in the 2nd half is a pretty good example of this. Not an easy touch, by any means, but that play is more than likely made, and a very legit shot on goal made, by a truly elite player. And within any soccer game, there are probably dozens of plays heavily impacted merely by how good a players touch is. I'm not knowledgeable enough to recognize all of them. But as what I would call a former "high level athlete", I can surely feel it happening when I see it. And when I hear people like you, or the announcers, talk about it, its pretty easy to then understand the impact. Even our best players, most famous players, routinely have balls get away from them, or put balls a yard or two outside where they need to be. We've got a team filled with Jonathon Kumingas, but no Steph Curry's or Nikola Jokic's...
Haha. didn't see your post before i responded to dbm
But most of our youth who would be the best soccer players never play soccer.
Why would they be the best soccer players? Use your words to explain it so we can record and memorialize your ignorance. below is one of the best to ever do it. he won a world cup. so what about the sport do you think our "best" athletes woudl bring to beat him that he hasn't seen a thousand times. he'd carve up our "best athletes" while rarely moving faster than a slow jog
When I was a junior in HS we won the state soccer championship. Best HS team in Indiana. I had played against most of the guys in our school across various sports for a decade. If I had ranked the top 20 in our school with the most soccer potential not a single one was on the soccer team.
We played soccer in freshman PE and those guys would routinely destroy the future varsity soccer stars. Face it, our most talented don't want to play soccer.
@dbmhoosier The games are different. I don't fully understand soccer, how I do basketball. But one comparison that helped me understand just how difficult it is to be really, really good at soccer vs. basketball...
Soccer and basketball share quite a lot of common elements. Obviously team based. Movement based. Round ball. Passing, cutting... they even share terms like dribbling, shooting. Nearly all skill based things that happen in basketball, you use your hands. In soccer, obviously, you use your feet. Try drawing a picture with your feet. Try eating a bowl of cereal with your feet. We're not naturally wired to be skillful with our feet, as humans. So developing the level of skill it takes to do similar things with the ball, in soccer, as you do in basketball... is more difficult... but its just as important.
-"Catching the ball", and then immediately making the next play... its a basic element of play in the game of basketball. But we're discussing World Cup level players not being great at it, and THAT being a distinguishing factor. that's part of what people refer to when they say "touch" in soccer. Imagine if we evaluated NBA players based on their ability to just catch a pass and immediately be able to take the ball and dribble it or shoot it. We don't, because that specific part of basketball is relatively easy. In soccer, even these basic elements are so hard to master, that there are SOOOO many ways for soccer players to distinguish themselves.
-Passing a basketball or football, versus passing a soccer ball. Throwing a football 50 yards in to a tight window is a very specific skill. And its highly coveted, its focused on, it produces some of the most high profile American athletes. And it isn't easy! And there are a TON of things that go in to being a high level quarterback. But imagine having to hit that same window, at similar distances, with your feet. How accurate could the best of the best football players be if they had to punt the ball to Jerry Rice, instead of throw it? And then better yet, what if they had to punt it out of the air from the center, without catching it and dropping it first?
I love basketball more than any sport. I love following american football more than I do soccer. But it doesn't take too much deep thought, if you've played high level sports, to understand how different, and how much more difficult, it is to be elite at soccer.
@dbmhoosiermhoosier lmao yeah your hickory huck high school isn't really much of a measure compared to the 250 million worldwide. This dude is 6'3 200 pounds runs a 4.3 40. ELITE level athlete.
got routinely abused by this guy. 5'7 145 probably a 4.9 40 at best. marginal athlete. you just don't get it
@dbmhoosier The games are different. I don't fully understand soccer, how I do basketball. But one comparison that helped me understand just how difficult it is to be really, really good at soccer vs. basketball...
Soccer and basketball share quite a lot of common elements. Obviously team based. Movement based. Round ball. Passing, cutting... they even share terms like dribbling, shooting. Nearly all skill based things that happen in basketball, you use your hands. In soccer, obviously, you use your feet. Try drawing a picture with your feet. Try eating a bowl of cereal with your feet. We're not naturally wired to be skillful with our feet, as humans. So developing the level of skill it takes to do similar things with the ball, in soccer, as you do in basketball... is more difficult... but its just as important.
-"Catching the ball", and then immediately making the next play... its a basic element of play in the game of basketball. But we're discussing World Cup level players not being great at it, and THAT being a distinguishing factor. that's part of what people refer to when they say "touch" in soccer. Imagine if we evaluated NBA players based on their ability to just catch a pass and immediately be able to take the ball and dribble it or shoot it. We don't, because that specific part of basketball is relatively easy. In soccer, even these basic elements are so hard to master, that there are SOOOO many ways for soccer players to distinguish themselves.
-Passing a basketball or football, versus passing a soccer ball. Throwing a football 50 yards in to a tight window is a very specific skill. And its highly coveted, its focused on, it produces some of the most high profile American athletes. And it isn't easy! And there are a TON of things that go in to being a high level quarterback. But imagine having to hit that same window, at similar distances, with your feet. How accurate could the best of the best football players be if they had to punt the ball to Jerry Rice, instead of throw it? And then better yet, what if they had to punt it out of the air from the center, without catching it and dropping it first?
I love basketball more than any sport. I love following american football more than I do soccer. But it doesn't take too much deep thought, if you've played high level sports, to understand how different, and how much more difficult, it is to be elite at soccer.
Excellent post. as @bar-down has noted, pay for play is a disaster. Shit, it's ruining youth basketball now too. How did Allen Iverson learn to be Allen Iverson. A playground. Not AAU or some pay to play club team. He honed his skills with 10,000 hours on pavement.
Same for Mbappe, Messi, Kane - and they learned the majority of their touch before the age of 10. Just like Iverson learned the majority of his skill with ballhandling. As a child. Playing pickup. Fucking around.
I don't know how to fix it.
@larsiu off topic but one of my all time favorite clips was this tutorial thing gary player did on getting out of the sand on an espn segment. he was talking about how to position your feet. and then how to open the club, hold your hands, what the swing should like. then he put it an inch away from the hole, turned to the camera and goes "now do that 25,000 times and you'll be able to do it as well." perfect.
@larsiu Not gonna happen overnight. I suspect we're seeing the US somewhere in the early/middle stages of their upward ascent in World Soccer competitiveness. Gonna need another generation or two worth of focus, and DNA, to ever fully close the gap. Getting more truly elite players to migrate to the United States, like Messi has, would help speed this process up, I would think.