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Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

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Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#211

Post by the_sleaze_ »

osullivj wrote: post #188
jppope wrote: post #78

The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.

This comment is wild :) In Europe we send our best athletes into athletics, not sport. Athletics is track and field, which reduces to speed, strength and endurance. Sport - football, cricket, tennis - is about technical mastery first, and only secondarily the speed strength and endurance to support it. Lionel Messi and Sachin Tendulkar would both have been deselected by any athletic selection procedure. The emphasis…

Messi was in a full time Futbol Academy playing futbol 6 hours every single day when his physical attributes diverged away from his peers.

He also runs a 4.6-second 40 meter dash, well fast enough for the NFL combine.

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#212

Post by karp773 »

SamBam wrote: post #19

I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking. I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries. In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many…

It's not about structured/unstructured play at all. Basketball and hockey teams in the very same USA are world class.

It's about in which sports in the country the pro clubs pay top money. It's that simple. It sets up the incentives for families, and everything else follows.

99.99% of the kids who play in the street have a lot of fun but will never make it anywhere near pro sports.

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#214

Post by weakened_malloc »

Mattasher wrote: post #54

The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose…

I love this - it seems so obvious but I had never thought about it that way!

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#215

Post by amanaplanacanal »

SamBam wrote: post #19

I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking. I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries. In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many…

I think the real answer is money. If there were as many soccer fans wanting to watch games on TV as there are baseball, football, and basketball, the US would be in the top rankings.

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#216

Post by jagged-chisel »

dfxm12 wrote: post #145
Marsymars wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any insight into why China does relatively well at the Olympics?

A documentary, maybe it was China Heavyweight (which is maybe 15yo at this point, so it might be out of date today), suggested that kids are trained for many years for specific Olympic sports (and nothing else) based on their rough physical attributes. This shotgun approach has success at finding great individual athletes, and will probably ensure they have a reasonable chance at qualifying someone at as many events…

> … kids are trained for many years for specific Olympic sports (and nothing else) based on their rough physical attributes. This shotgun approach …

Looks a lot more targeted than “shotgun.” Not quite laser-focused, but certainly tighter than a wide-cast net.

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#217

Post by glitchc »

SamBam wrote: post #19

I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking. I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries. In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many…

How proficient a country is at a given sport is derived from the size of the feeder pool. Baring extremely rare exceptions, top talent is strongly correlated with deep feeder pools.

Sports are always cultural: Kids grow up idolizing the stars of their childhood, and those stars are drawn from the sports their parents and community expose them to. In Europe, soccer is the biggest sport, everyone grows up watching soccer on weekends and so the feeder pool (i.e. the pool of kids who are drawn to the game) is much greater than other sports. Deep feeder pool allows the system to filter relentlessly to tease out the best.

In the US, and North America in general, kids grow up watching football, basketball, baseball and hockey. So that's what kids end up playing, and all of those sports have deep feeder pools. Soccer not so much.

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#218

Post by yanhangyhy »

we have a idiom/joke to describe this: "美中不足" ( which origins means a flaw within beauty). but 美 also means America 中 also means China and 不 = no/not 足=foot/soccer..so Neither country is very good at football (soccer). of course china sucks more on this

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#219

Post by skillina »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #92
jppope wrote: post #78

The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.

I don’t think this is fully correct. Athletic skill is not universal across sports. A athlete that can be trained to be a star football player may not be able to be trained to be a star baseball player.

Kids don't pick a sport based on the one they have the most potential in. Some parents might, but kids would pick a sport based on the one they enjoy, which will be influenced by social pressures. The question isn't "can they go pro in the second sport," the question is "can they play the second sport well enough to play with / impress their friends."

Re: Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

#220

Post by _DeadFred_ »

rauljordan2020 wrote: post #140
SamBam wrote: post #19

I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking. I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries. In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many…

I'm from Honduras, which is also quite a poor country, and the sport (soccer) is all we do and all everyone talks about. It's a core part of our society and a core part just what one does as a human, so since we are kids we think of always kicking a ball around no matter where you are, even fashioning balls from socks tied together or rubber bands, and we all learn how to control them really well even barefoot, in di…

In the US we had the same but for pickup American football. We played on the street in the neighborhood every night, and had standing games at a kind centralized empty field on Sat/Sunday where everyone know to just show up and there'd be a game, or after it rained (mud football). Only equipment was a football or a nerf football. Kids are kids :)
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