[SamBam]

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 boys are playing once or twice every day, in an unstructured format, during recess and after school.

Starting from a young age, Europeans who show talent are getting drafted into soccer academies before they're 10, greatly increasing the amount of competitive play. But this is on top of the everyday soccer they're playing.

For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." A local league costs money. A private high school with a good program costs money. In Europe, beyond (again) the continuous unstructured play, the academies and farm teams are free.

Finally, a good European player doesn't usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18.

Meanwhile, a gifted US soccer player heads to college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season, and four years later might get on one of the relatively few club teams.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc. And often enough adults join in because they were once the kids too.

So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly.

One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol.

Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference.

Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.

[jandrewrogers]

The counterpoint to this is that, broadly speaking, Mexico is demonstrably no better at soccer than the US when it matters. A common talking point in recent years is that the US league is actually better at developing Mexican talent than the Mexican league, though that somewhat reflects different incentives.

I think a core issue is that US and Mexican teams rarely have an opportunity to compete against teams significantly better than themselves. Furthermore, structural constraints within both leagues limit the amount of talent separation that can occur between teams, so it looks a bit like being stuck in a local minima in terms of talent development.

[huevosabio]

Mexico performs as you'll expect a third world country that loves football to perform, and the US performs as well as you would expect a first world country that is ambivalent to football to perform.

I think the real mystery is, how come Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay play so much better than what you would expect from relatively poor countries?

My guess is that their leagues are fairly developed industries, like you would expect in the first world.

[paulsen]

> My guess is that their leagues are fairly developed industries, like you would expect in the first world.

Pretty much, like in Europe, if you have any interest/talent in football, you enroll in your local club as a kid and go on from there, in Argentina you have a multitude of leagues until you reach Primera Division, so you have from 5 to 6 levels of competition in between organized directly by the Argentine Football Association, founded in 1891, also ran the first tournament in that same year, which makes it the oldest associated football league other than the British FA cup (1871).

Below that you have the regional/provincial leagues, the least populated province, Tierra del Fuego, has 2; Buenos Aires province has 70+ by itself.

[huevosabio]

Holy hell. Yea that sounds about right!

[eldaisfish]

Football in Brazil has history, legacy, and mind share. I can name several professional teams from Brazil - Flamenco, Corinthians, Santos, etc. I also know of River Plate, Rosario and Boca Juniors from Argentina. This points to the fact that Brazilian and Argentine teams are older than the Mexican teams.

I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s. The oldest Brazilian and Argentina clubs date back to the 1900s.

[loloquwowndueo]

> I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s.

Teams like Atlante and América were founded in 1916.

[sumanep]

We play football every time in Argentina, not to say in Brazil

[brudgers]

The Mexican Primera favors a unique type of athlete…players who can regularly play at 10,000 feet (3000m) because many matches are played in and around Mexico City. And other clubs are also above 5000 feet.

Add in daytime heat, night cold, humidity and smog and you get a very different practical reality that shapes the pace and tactics of the Primeria and soccer culture in general. In turn that shapes who succeeds as a soccer playing athlete.

[scythe]

This is an interesting theory. But do Mexican soccer players do much better at home games?

[brudgers]

Not clear what you are asking, but at the international level Azteca is notoriously advantageous…of course top European sides never visit so there’s no general empirical data.

And you won’t get much more from the world cup because the only ceded European side favored to play at Azteca is England in the round of 8.

[Symbiote]

Cricket is even more accessible: you need a bat (which could be a piece of wood), but you don't need space. You can compress the game to play in a 1.5m wide alleyway between two buildings.

I think this is why it became so popular in India etc.

[airstrike]

Soccer is still more accessible. You don't even need a ball. As a kid, you'll find yourself kicking around a crushed coke can with friends and trying to score.

[ramblerman]

This is a silly form of no true Scotsman, you don't create a Messi if he had been kicking a coke can around.

[Someone]

Depends on location. Cricket requires a ball that bounces. Football, you can play with a wad of left-over paper tied together with tape or strings.

Cricket puts restrictions on the pitch (ground must be fairly hard and even where the ball bounces) that are easily met in typically dry India but harder to meet in wet England, where they need to nurture/torture grass to get the right conditions (growing it to get long, strongly interleaving roots, but then drying out the ground and cutting the grass very short to not make the bouncing ball slip)

[brudgers]

Cricket also does not require a lot of running and because the defense controls the ball, it fills a lot of time at a slow pace.

Like Baseball, a Sunday afternoon game has a low risk of an injury that prevents work on Monday.

[brigandish]

My mate broke someone's arm bowling at him. Cricket always has an element of danger, for both the fielders and the batters.

[stevekemp]

Getting hit in the face/neck by a cricket ball moving at 150mph can cause serious injuries, even death.

For example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Hughes

[sometimes_all]

Minor nit: Fastest ever recorded ball bowled was 100 mph. I believe you were thinking 150 kmph.

Also, if we're talking about street/amateur cricket, or even higher-level cricket a couple of levels removed from international, you are rarely going to have rockets hurled at you. Most will be 120 kmph tops.

[zem]

there is also a ton of grass-roots football in India, with kids kicking a ball around wherever there is a space for it. that doesn't translate to having good national teams simply because there is not much funding to develop the game, unlike with cricket.

[puelocesar]

A ball? When I was a kid we rolled a bunch of socks together and played with it in the middle of the street and we defined the goal area with a pair of flip flops.

No need of a ball and infrastructure when you really want to play

[beepdyboop]

Rolling a bunch of socks together is.. a ball? Right?

[ksec]

>she was immersed in it

The other part is not only do these kids spend more time on these sports depending on culture or norm but also the players they are playing against.

The same is with Basketball in US, Table Tennis in Taiwan and Football in Europe. You are likely playing against people who are much just so much better at the sport compared to other countries with different norm. You are basically training with better people. And this pushes the quality of players even higher.

[mcmoor]

I thought the concrete ground is much more important for basketball, otherwise the ball would bounce all over the place. In comparison, muddy ground for soccer is part of the fun.

[WhyNotHugo]

> Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc.

The same is true in Argentina. And in school kids play almost every recess too.

A lot of very prominent player from Argentina had this kind of humble beginning too.

[Spooky23]

It’s also “the sport”. Americans don’t really do casual sports anymore and there is a ton of competition in the various leagues.

In many parts of the US, soccer is a fall sport that competes with football in school leagues. Football teams require a small army of players and tend to suck out the oxygen. It doesn’t help that there’s no little league equivalent for soccer, so there’s a ton of pay to play BS to a much greater degree than football or baseball.

In my area, you need to commit to a full year travel soccer team that’s often owned by the school coach to get any playtime in high school.

[uxp100]

USAmericans casually play basketball still. Basically a few kids shooting hoops at every little court you pass, and lightly organized (just show up at a time) adult games are common too.

[WalterBright]

I played soccer during recess at school. I was inept at it. I was terrible at football, too. I really stunk at basketball. Berry berry bad at baseball. Sank at swimming.

[rauljordan2020]

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 difficult terrain, in rain, sun, shine, anything. It isn't a structured activity. Coming to the US I realized so many American sports need a ton of setup...lots of expensive equipment, a full squad, a special field (baseball), etc. and not just something you can do easily on the street with your friends. It isn't "lived and breathed" as it is where I'm from, and we have so many incredible players. Unfortunately, we are a poor country so the best players won't become professionals and instead pursue other careers, so our national team isn't great, but I know guys that could easily be pros in Europe if they went down that path

[_DeadFred_]

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 :)

[rauljordan2020]

I would argue it isn't the same. Not every single American male grow up playing American football. It is fragmented across the country. However, for us, almost every single human has the experience of soccer being an integral part of our lives at every stage of it, from toddler to adulthood. It's so pervasive it is part of our core vocabulary and idioms, the govt shuts down when real madrid vs barcelona play, and everyone comes together over a single cause, no matter young or old. Soccer covers every aspect of our lives over there.

[1659447091]

> We played on the street in the neighborhood every night

Street light to utility box

[confidantlake]

I think you are overlooking the more obvious answer. All the talent gets sucked up by the nfl/nba/mlb.

[venzaspa]

I think you're probably underestimating just how much time kids in other places spend playing football in their spare time. When I was a kid, we were out 2-3 hours every night after school playing it.

[onlypassingthru]

IIRC, Steve Nash wanted to play professional soccer but since there wasn't a professional pathway had to settle for playing basketball in college and later the NBA.

[NotGMan]

Why not both?

And sprinkle in some cultural differences (soccer is not that popular in the USA, so it's self-reinforcing).

[Detrytus]

Well, nfl/nba are focused on big guys, 6’3 and above. In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap. And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all.

[majormajor]

Lotta roles for fast smaller guys in NFL and MLB, so there's certainly competition.

Beaten-to-death takes about baseball and athleticism aside, if a kid shows potential there it's a great path to follow:

- some of the highest individual salaries and (to date) least restrictions on team spending

- it's very very very easy for individual talent to stand out at basically every position; this can be harder in football and various levels especially for non-QB positions

But once you're on the baseball path you're not gonna be training a skillset that would have much overlap with a soccer skillset.

[dpark]

> In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap.

This is untrue and also just silly. The talent pools for horse jockeys and NBA players don't overlap. The talent pool for soccer and football is probably 90% overlap. Smaller players are certainly more likely to be successful in soccer than football but tall players can do great in soccer and average height guys can do well in football.

> And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all.

Come on. Baseball doesn't demand the same athleticism as soccer but these guys are still elite athletes and there are plenty of stories of both MLB and NFL offering positions to the same players.

[Detrytus]

Taller players do great in soccer, to a point. I mean, goalkeepers are the tallest, typically, about 6'4, 6'5. For field players, they usually max out around 6'3, but that's only for certain specialized positions like a striker, or central defender. Above that and you are too big and too slow, smaller players will quite literally run circles around you. I think overall average height of soccer player is below 6 feet.

Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time is only 5'7 - that should tell you something.

[dpark]

> Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time is only 5'7 - that should tell you something.

One data point doesn’t tell me anything. Cristiano Ronaldo, also frequently in the “GOAT” conversation is 6’2”.

On Argentina’s national team, literally no one is shorter than Messi. 17 of the players (20 with keepers) are taller than the Argentinian average male height with only 6 below.

> they usually max out around 6'3, but that's only for certain specialized positions like a striker, or central defender

Specialized positions like “all of them”. There are literally no positions in soccer where it is advantageous to be short. There are simply positions where it is less of a disadvantage.

> Above that and you are too big and too slow, smaller players will quite literally run circles around you.

I’m the same height as Messi so I would love to believe that there is some athletic advantage to being short, but it’s just not true. Messi is outstanding in spite of his height, not because of it.

Short people are not faster than tall people, not even very tall people. Maybe in the extreme outliers this is true, but Usain Bolt is 6’5”.

[musicale]

As you indicate the most popular (and generally highest paying) professional sports in the US are football, basketball and baseball.

This includes college football and basketball, which are part of the career path for those sports.

Women's soccer is relatively popular, however.

[lostapathy]

> Women's soccer is relatively popular, however.

This may be a function of the fact that no other women's team sport is at all popular in the US?

[notesinthefield]

Womens basketball viewership across college, pro and semi pro levels is significantly more popular than equivalent womens soccer levels. Non-USWNT games are surprisingly hard to locate and stream.

[onlypassingthru]

The WNBA would like a word.

[hunterpayne]

The average NFL CB is the same size as a striker, but quicker and faster. And it isn't even all that close. Its the living and breathing soccer that matters. In those places, the best athletes play soccer. In the US, they play football or basketball. And if you think you can do anything at a pro level without extreme levels of athleticism, you are greatly deluded.

[jandrewrogers]

The amount of distance covered in a soccer game is twice that of a cornerback in an NFL game. Unlike NFL, soccer also has very limited substitutions so you can't readily swap in fresh legs. An athlete needs to be able to go the full distance at a high level.

A natural cornerback isn't going to be "quicker and faster" over that many miles without a different kind of conditioning that probably favors different genetics. That said, I do think the game would translate well for some cornerbacks in some roles.

[leoc]

Additionally, a top-division European soccer team also typically plays something like 34 or 38 league games every season, and that doesn’t include things like domestic cups and European competition.

[jandrewrogers]

Excellent point. I hadn’t even considered the number of games. Good players will play over 2500 minutes in a season. That is a completely different type of wear and tear.

[otherme123]

> Finally, a good European player doesn't necessarily head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 18 or 19.

My guess is that less than 5% of european soccer players ever set a foot in College, at least in the biggest Leagues (UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany). I only know two: Lampard and Iniesta. There might be a few more, but they are oddities.

If anything, a good player and good student usually has to make a choice at 18 years old: "am I good enough to bet my future on being a pro player and delay/abandon the College, or do I give up on being pro and focus on studying?"

[holgerschurig]

The most important factor however is that many EU countries don't have a US-style college system. E.g. in Germany we have a very different schooling system and a very different job education system. Even the university system is quite a bit different to the US-style.

Some jobs (e.g. bookkeeper) here are apprenticeships where in the US you'd go to some community college.

So there might be european soccer players around that don't have a "college" but still have learned a job from the basics.

That said: a german source says that only 19.6% of the soccer stars (Bundesliga) have learned a common job.

[holgerschurig]

Oh, and another thing: that only 19.6% "already" have one isn't that much concerning. It is actually quite common that people do a job education (or 2nd job education) at an older age.

Examples: you learnt to a nurse (which isn't college here), but the stress is too much. So at age 30 you learn something else, e.g. carpentry or backoffice things.

So that someone that learned soccer learns something else, e.g. insurance agent, at age 30 would be totally normal and socially acceptable over here.

[hunterpayne]

Try joining a serious club between 12 to 14. Most soccer players that turn pro left school years ago. Sports and education aren't linked outside of the US.

[pjc50]

The US sports system is especially structured around colleges; while you get named city teams in American football and basketball, there doesn't seem to be anything like the European system where there are often multiple city teams, teams with "works" origins, and generally the legacy of the big early 1900s working class soccer boom. Which was organic/grassroots around self-organized clubs.

In fact, class plays a big role: soccer used to be "too working class" for British university goers, who play rugby (named after the elite school!) or more esoteric stuff like Oxbridge rowing.

[red-iron-pine]

also worth noting that most of the big US sports started as college sports

football, basketball, vollyball, etc. were creations invented at and for universities. they're still big there, and they're the core of the sports in many cases.

e.g. the "ivy league" is literally a sports league.

[PearlRiver]

Most soccer players tend to retire in their late 30s so they are better off pursuing an education after their pro athlete career. Of course the best are multi millionaires who never have to work and can live from passive income.

[marcus_holmes]

Not necessarily true, there are lots of careers where have been a professional footballer is the qualification in and of itself without having anything to do with football. E.g. sales, sufficient people find talking to an ex-footballer impressive enough to open doors that getting a job in sales is easy.

And of course there's always the coaching/management path.

[karp773]

If you have a choice (an offer) to be a pro player at 18, it means you had already given up on school by 12 or younger.

[harrall]

The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).

Soccer has major competition in the US.

Because these sports started in America too, America usually dominates them.

[Qem]

> The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).

It appears the sports industry in US skewed local preferences toward hardware-intensive sports, that sell lots of gear. Poor children can start playing soccer stuffing crumpled paper in plastic bags to create a makeshift ball, and using spaced sandals as makeshift goalposts. Minimal hardware requirements. It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera. Basketball comes closer to soccer in this regard.

[ricree]

>It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera

In practice, casual football isn't any more resource heavy than soccer. Most non-league games of football are going to be "touch football", which only requires a ball, a field, and some sort of end marker (as a kid, it was usually just "from that tree to that other tree").

Obviously, organized league play has a ton more equipment, but the sort of informal casual games that kids or young adults play requires much less. It's one of those things that doesn't really get talked about a ton compared to league play, so it's easy to miss for those who didn't grow up with it.

[skywhopper]

This is way off. You only need a ball to play American football. Or a ball and bat to play baseball. Yes, the organized competitive versions have more gear involved, but so does organized soccer/football.

[toast0]

A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat if you're hitting a light enough ball. It you can scrounge up a tennis ball, they work pretty well for street baseball. Don't need gloves, bases can be whatever you can agree on. Of course, it you have something vaguely soccerball shaped, you can play kickball with improvised bases rather than playing soccer.

[bilbo0s]

>A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat

Right around the 80’s and 90’s the idea of zero-tolerance youth crime policies swept the US. Right around the same time the popularity of baseball began a decline in the US. It went from being a universally played ‘pickup culture’ sport, to a sparsely played ‘pay to play’ sport.

Now I’m not gonna say the need for 8 or 9 boys to roam around a neighborhood with a giant stick looking for a place to play was the reason the ‘pickup culture’ games died. But I will say that it was probably a lot safer for those boys to just go to a basketball court and wait their turn in a ‘pickup culture’ game that did not require a giant stick or bat.

[brigandish]

Baseball was invented in Britain.

[rascul]

American Football is Canadian.

[drewmate]

The same is basically true for most other sports in the US too, and yet there are still high-level Americans. Certainly baseball (which other countries do still play in a limited fashion), hockey and football. With football we are undisputed world champs for the last 60 years! Joking aside, there is no doubt that high-level NFL players are seriously talented and their whole sport revolves around structured practices and weekly games.

Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.

I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.

[surgical_fire]

The thing is that the US team sports you can think of such Baseball or American Football, have nearly no popularity outside of the US. Maybe Baseball in places like Japan or Venezuela.

Maybe the only parallel to soccer I can think of is sports like Rugby in UK and some English-speaking countries, Cricket in India, and some sports endemic to countries (such as GAA in Ireland).

The best way to compare the US to other countries in a sport that is similar in terms of interest among other countries is something like Volleyball. Which the US tends to be very good at, with many major competitors. I can't think of anywhere that volleyball is a #1 sport that sees a lot of unstructured play.

All this was obviously about team sports.

[majormajor]

Baseball obviously has high popularity in a substantial number of non-US countries, though the main ones that feed the MLB (the DR, Venezuela, and Cuba) aren't often top-of-mind countries for many. The Japan/Korea interest is obviously non-trivial too.

Basketball is the obvious one you're leaving out that's about the same age as Volleyball (itself a US team sport), and probably has the most international popularity -- especially if just going by people-counting since China alone is an enormous market.

Funny thing, though: US players make up about 73% of the MLB but about 78% of the NBA, despite the NBA having more international popularity, and the current best players in both being from non-US countries.

[surgical_fire]

The thing about basketball is that it is typically not a sport where it's a primary interest.

Go to places where you find good Basketball players. Germany, former Yugoslavian countries, Spain, Argentina... All those places are primarily Football countries.

You will find a few people interested in the sport, some youngster might be playing it for fun, but still very much behind football.

It's just not comparable.

[musictubes]

Aren’t the ideal bodies pretty different for basketball and soccer? Are 6’6” guys a good size for soccer? How about taller? I’m sure European basketball players grow up playing soccer but at some point they end up playing to their strengths.

[jandrewrogers]

The tallest soccer players are right around 6’6”. Outside of positions like center back and striker (and keeper), they rarely exceed 6’0”.

[majormajor]

That's... very American of it, still? The idea of a single sport in a country is weird and silly from a US point of view. I'm more interested in hockey, why would anyone think that would make me not a fan of basketall or football or baseball?

But... so? I thought we were talking about if these sports had "nearly no popularity"? Not if they were displacing soccer entirely. "Nearly no popularity" is pretty obviously false based on eyeballs and sales, even if soccer is more popular... And there's a lot more countries and people in the world than just Europe. (But also very American of you to ignore them ;) .) How much would it even matter to the NBA if China is or isn't primarily a basketball country, or just a country with hundreds of millions of fans that also have another sport above it in their personal rankings, if they're making money either way?

EDIT: and of course the name "soccer" originated in England because there were multiple foot-related games and so people made a more specific name. So maybe the weird countries are the ones that lost a fun multi-sport ecosystem and ended up a monoculture...

[skywhopper]

I can’t speak to its actual popularity, but when I visit Europe and local folks hear I’m from the US, I’m surprised how often they are interested in talking about the NBA. Maybe it’s more pronounced in Eastern Europe where a lot of basketball talent has made it to the NBA over the years.

[surgical_fire]

Well, if you are from the US, and I was talking to you about sports... Yeah, I would try to find a middle ground so that a conversation could happen. NBA is likely a reasonable thing to try.

Why would I bother talking to you about Bundesliga, Champions League, Libertadores Cup or whatever else?

Also, I worked with many people from Eastern Europe. Apart from Lithuania, I think all other countries are interested in Football more than in Basketball.

[neves]

Baseball appeal in a country is always a history lesson. You can measure how a country was fucked up by USA based in their love of baseball: - Cuba - Japan - Panama - Venezuela

No other country can like a sport this boring.

[musictubes]

Korea, Dominican Republic, Mexico all have pro leagues as well. There are more leagues growing in places like the UK and Australia as well though fully amateur at this point I think. Suffice it to say fans across all of these countries find it thrilling enough to play and watch.

I don’t understand the casual sniping against baseball. There are plenty of sports I have no interest in but I don’t call them out because nobody cares what I think of them.

[temp_praneshp]

Basketball?

[ignoramous]

Despite the fairly similar cultural and financial incentives at play in Europe & South America, France and Spain (Portugal to an extent, as well) pretty much lead the footballing world in terms of elite talent. Their depth is ridiculous.

For France, their sporting renaissance, if we can call it that, started way earlier in the late 1960s with what we'd call "DEI" today: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-...

For Spain, correctly focusing on developing in-game intelligence and skill was key in out-competing stronger & taller teams (at a time when rapidly improving football pitches were proving great for playing positional & possession-based game): A very 1970s Dutch way of playing kick-started by Johan Cruyff in 1990s at Barcelona, and converted into concrete results for the national team by Luis Aragones & Vincente del Bosque in 2000s/2010s: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that...

[hawaiianbrah]

I believe most of what you said, but no college varsity player is playing only a few times a week. Even the lowest division of NCAA teams would have practice or matches 5-6 times a week in season.

[SamBam]

So leaving aside whether 5-6 times is "a few," the bigger issue is the length of the season.

Varsity soccer season in the US is usually just four months, August-November.

Spring season (with no games) is February-April. During that season, NCAA places strict limitations on how often teams can practice: Division I and II teams are allowed only up to 8 hours per week, with just 4 of those being coach-supervised! [1]

Finally there is no organized playing for all of January, May, June and July.

So even for a player in a D1 team, they are training much, much less of the year than a 15-year-old on a farm team in Europe.

1. https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fal...

[hibikir]

Sure, but as far as the people that are going to be professional, and good enough to play for a national team, you'd already be playing in the top levels of soccer by 19. Lamine Yamal was playing for the A team in Barcelona when he was barely 16, and was a starter in Spain's eurocup win at 17. More "normal" players, likePedri and Messi, played their first minutes for Barcelona at 17.

So if you even smell a college varsity team, you are already in the slow track. It's really rare to find a star that wasn't at least in a farm team at 15. I have a friend that was already there at 10, and his ceiling was just starter in a low tier team in La Liga.

[skywhopper]

What’s intriguing to me is that several American colleges end up becoming magnets for European and South American soccer players. My midwestern mid-tier alma mater’s soccer team is 95% non-American.

[glitchc]

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.

[drivebyhooting]

This is pretty much true for all high level competition in the US.

It’s extremely hard to get good at chess. It’s extremely hard to get good at math. It’s extremely hard to get good at gymnastics. It’s extremely hard to get good at Piano.

Meanwhile, in China or Russia, there are dedicated schools for mass producing concert, pianist, etc.

[thehoff]

What about baseball travel teams? Our kid plays travel soccer and it is expensive no doubt but our baseball parent friends pay more. I don't hear anyone complaining that baseball is pay to play.

Also, from what I hear hockey is also extremely expensive. I've heard that you can't leave a sporting goods store without spending at least $1,000 on gear alone for a season. I've yet to hear anyone complain that hockey is pay to play.

I think the other commenter has it right, most kids just gravitate towards American Football, Baseball, or Basketball.

And in the state I live in, of probably the top five soccer teams, one is a private school, the rest are public.

Edit: I don't know if other sports are like this but so many soccer parents are just extremely unrealistic/toxic. So many think they have the next superstar, questioning the coach on their child's play time, whey their kids didn't get placed on higher leveled teams, questioning why a coach is running practices certain ways.

[brigandish]

Isn't the contention that, because football is pay to play in the US, the US isn't that good compared to places that it isn't pay to play?

Baseball, basketball, American football are all sports with much less international participation, and generally require pay to play elsewhere at around the same level as in the US, because of the way the sports are. There's no refutation possible from that.

[thehoff]

I do agree its expensive but so many point to just the cost being the big issue.

How is it (on an international stage) our US women's national team is consistently good? The teams/clubs in our region charge the same for boys/girls. Related, I know the two biggest clubs by us do offer some financial aid (50% to 100% off).

Then there are clubs that don't charge as much. From our kid's team its the end of the season and we have 4 families leaving to another club that is easily 8x cheaper. So those types of teams/clubs do exist. Not to mention school teams don't charge to play.

[troupo]

> For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play."

This is true for most sports (and activities) in the US. Additionally, the US doesn't have the concept of unstructured play, as many (most?) kids are fully depend on the parent or the school to take them places, since most of the US is so car-dependent.

[j_w]

I don't know why any reply disagrees with this.

Look at basketball in the US. The best players will tell you all they did as a kid was play basketball. You can go to anywhere somewhat populated and the outdoor courts are in use almost all the time school is not in session for pickup play. Outside of structured practice (if they are on a team), many kids are still playing pickup games or shooting casually.

Soccer fields rarely get use outside of structured play. Kids that play soccer in the US just don't play as much, so their skills are (on average) much worse.

[misterinfo]

At my high school and college, the best athletes were playing Football or basketball not soccer. If some of those athletic running backs were playing soccer all their life they would've been a problem.

[bjohnson225]

If those running backs played soccer they'd all be asked to slim down. Soccer requires a mix of strength, agility and endurance.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

The physical attributes needed for soccer are quite different from football or basketball. I don't think any football or basketball players would be good at soccer even if they tried.

[hunterpayne]

Nope, not true at all. The average NFL CB makes the best athletes in soccer or rugby look like furniture movers, even in drills designed for soccer. Same for the majority NBA PGs. There is a lot of overlap in team sports for specific types of athleticism. The average pro you see on TV could usually beat the best player in your hometown at whatever sport they played. And not just beat, but beat badly. There are NFL DTs that can do 360 dunks and run a 40 in 4.6sec (at 300lbs) which is faster than your average pro striker in soccer.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

That makes no sense. Some NFL guys may be fast but that's not all you need in soccer. You need to be quick but you also need ball control, endurance and in general understand tactics in depth.

A lot of top athletes will probably do pretty well in a lot of sports but they won't be world class in another sport. Even in motorsports Indycar or NASCAR drivers don't do well in Formula 1 despite them looking very similar.

[theklub]

Lebron as a goalie? Or hell half the nba...

[dh2022]

+1. Want to add that in Europe promising players drafted by clubs by age of 10 already get soccer equipment and some token money ($50 / week), practice every day after school and transportation to out of town games is on the club’s bus. In the US at that age parents pay for the equipment, and drive their kids to every game-including out of town. And because US is so large these are long drives.

[karp773]

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.

[SamBam]

Basketball is the only sport in the US that has a similar level of hundreds of hours a year of unstructured play, so it makes sense that the US is great at it.

Hockey, who is the US competing against? Canada. No other country in the world takes it particularly seriously, so of course the US is one of the top two countries... (I often tell each of my two kids that they're one of my top two kids.)

[akudha]

Isn’t the costing money part true for other sports too, in the U.S? I remember there was a report on how much it costs for kids to play sports (more perfect union video, I think) and it isn’t cheap. It is made worse by (what else?) private equity

[qingcharles]

Isn't soccer a mostly women's sport in the USA? Do boys even play it at all?

The USA women's team is world class, probably for this reason.

In the UK boys mostly play soccer while girls traditionally played netball (basketball).

[gbear605]

Soccer is extremely widespread and played by both boys and girls at a young age (up until puberty or so), but there definitely is a gender gap after that. I'd guess that there are a lot of other sports that are almost solely played by boys, so boys tend to drift away from soccer, while there are fewer options for girls. (Though there are some - lacrosse and softball for a couple examples.)

[stephencanon]

Field hockey is almost exclusively a girls sport in the US, while boys have (American) football in the fall. Both draw from the potential pool of soccer players in US middle and high schools.

[amanaplanacanal]

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.

[ma2kx]

I don't think the unstructured format directly contributes to the playing strength but rather attracts more player to play in a local club. Even in the town where I life with less than 100'000 people there are 10 clubs, 168 teams and nearly 3000 (mostly semi-professional) soccer player. Of course not all of them are young anymore but extrapolate this numbers to the population of a country it becomes a huge talent pool available for the major clubs.

And compared to the US there is a far more dense competition as any state has its own national league and on top are the Champions, Europe and Conference league. So every major soccer team plays in a national and a europene league at the same time and thus the players get of course much more routine.

But hey, we suck at baseball and basketball.

[rurban]

Exactly. The same reasons why US players will never be better at table tennis also. It's the capitalist school and club system, which forbids any advantage in the early years. If you have to pay, you won't train that often.

[dataflow]

What about women's soccer?

[nchmy]

Yes, this is it.

[dogmatism]

> college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season

wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?

Also, now with NIL etc, college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league

[SamBam]

> wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?

Of course. American varsity soccer players play ~5 times a week for four months a year, August through November.

February through April is the Spring season and varsity teams are forbidden from playing too much. D1 and D2 teams can only train 8 hours per week, of which at most 4 hours per week may be coached!

And then 4 months of the year are off-season and there is no structured training at all!

This is a ridiculously small amount of time compared to a 15 year old Spanish kid playing in a farm team.

And they're doing this part-time stuff until they're 22 or 23. A typical European professional player would have been playing full time since they were 16.

> college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league

... except no where near at the level of European farm teams.