Ludicrous.@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.
The mistake in your reasoning is thinking that football, baseball, and basketball take only the great athletes who wouldn't have had touch and skill had they been brought up in a soccer environment. Although I agree that maybe the greatest American soccer players woudn't have been the guys that make the pros in other sports, the point is that if all our kids at a young age--given our sheer population, health, tranining facilities, and money--were as dedicated to soccer as other nations, we would obviously (it's like math, dudes) have better players.@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?
@ohio-guy @zeke4ahs @bar-down You guys already found the answer. What do we do when we are young and bored during the summer? We go out and shoot hoops. What does everyone else do? They go out and kick the ball around. It's not DNA. It's a lifetime of marinating yourself in the sport. It's going to take a cultural shift, and then an extra generation on top of that, to really hit the top tier.
I don't think we use the term "athletic" in the same way. I think the guy who can change speeds, control the ball with his foot, etc. is displaying athleticism just as much as the guy who runs fast and jumps. Baseball is the same way. John Kruk, Tony Gwynn, Kyle Schwarber--all have athletic skill (hand eye coordination is athleticism, too). I consider the foot-eye skill the same way and still maintain that because the other sports are so much more popular in the US, they end up drawing most of the dorks you just posted away from soccer playing, and away from playing it exclusively.@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
Well, that or chess club for that dude.
BINGO.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.
Ok. I'll buy that. It's a corrollary of just get more kids involved and have them play more, in their play time, etc. but you're right that the best route into that is seeking dad's approval/teaching moments from dad.Yeah, like how did you learn to throw a baseball or shoot a free throw? Your dad. What if your dad never thew a baseball, never saw a basketball before?@dbmhoosier i think we got rid of every other sport and only played soccer we'd still basically be the same. i don't think it's a numbers issue . i think it's a century of quality dna we are lacking. messi's goal was obscene. there are no words for how hard it is to keep that ball down as the only way to hit it is how he did and a shitty player would have basically missed it completely and a quality player sent it way over the bar without much power. only he can keep that ball down
It's cultural
By the way, I in no way care that the U.S. isn't as good in soccer as the rest of the world, and am not sure it's the greatest thing in the world to want to recruit a bunch of kids to dedicate their lives to kicking around a soccer ball. Sports is too important in our cultures as is.
That's exactly what Mamdani is working on.@ohio-guy @zeke4ahs @bar-down You guys already found the answer. What do we do when we are young and bored during the summer? We go out and shoot hoops. What does everyone else do? They go out and kick the ball around. It's not DNA. It's a lifetime of marinating yourself in the sport. It's going to take a cultural shift, and then an extra generation on top of that, to really hit the top tier.
And @bar-down is falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
@goat @bradstevens I wore covers off of tangos. Literally. To where the ball literally fell apart on the street. I grew up on a dead end street with no traffic and incredible curbs. My neighbor and I played every single free second. Literally. He was on the youth Olympic teams. Played D1 blah blah. No one in the world played more than we did. Guaranteed
we could not do what the argies brazilians Spanish French do. It is dna. And addition doesn’t improve our lot. Just redundancy. Maybe at the top we end up 3 Pulisics. Our ceiling will still be the same
7 out of the last 9 posts. If I didn't know better...
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You're proving my point for me. The reason you were as good as you were was one part raw atheticism, 10 parts training.@goat @bradstevens I wore covers off of tangos. Literally. To where the ball literally fell apart on the street. I grew up on a dead end street with no traffic and incredible curbs. My neighbor and I played every single free second. Literally. He was on the youth Olympic teams. Played D1 blah blah. No one in the world played more than we did. Guaranteed
we could not do what the argies brazilians Spanish French do. It is dna. And addition doesn’t improve our lot. Just redundancy. Maybe at the top we end up 3 Pulisics. Our ceiling will still be the same
But your 1 part athleticism was never as good as the Antwaan Randle El of soccer that was never developed. There's no shame in that. ARE was a freak:
Similarly, I could play basketball every hour of my life and never be able to compete with Jokich or Bird.
I'll make it another. I don't understand your point. I'm catching up in the thread. Is that a bad thing?7 out of the last 9 posts. If I didn't know better...
@goat @bradstevens I wore covers off of tangos. Literally. To where the ball literally fell apart on the street. I grew up on a dead end street with no traffic and incredible curbs. My neighbor and I played every single free second. Literally. He was on the youth Olympic teams. Played D1 blah blah. No one in the world played more than we did. Guaranteed
we could not do what the argies brazilians Spanish French do. It is dna. And addition doesn’t improve our lot. Just redundancy. Maybe at the top we end up 3 Pulisics. Our ceiling will still be the same
Dude, you're a drunk manwhore with several diagnosable personality disorders, and you still accomplished more athletically than most of us will. That was all experience and training. It's not your fault God graced you with the athleticism of a soggy pinto bean. Take a naturally skilled kid out of his inner city whatever and give him your experience, and he might very well be the American Messi. We just won't know until it happens. Until we get kids to default to the soccer ball instead of the basketball. En masse.
@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.
I'm beginning to think there's a reason poor and socialist countries are better. They don't turn sports into a cash grab at the youth level.
VIVA LA REVOLUCION!
That and they don't have all of the shit our kids do. But, I agree with your cash grab comment.