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 necessarily head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 18 or 19.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?"
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.
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.
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.
+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.
I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either.
Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.
I can’t speak for other countries but in India cricket eclipses all other sports and drains talent. But soccer is gaining popularity recently but still long way to go.
If you think about it, India and China already have other very popular sports. Soccer is kind of somewhat of a niche there.
Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.
> Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina.
Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.
Didn't read the post, but the problem is that in most top soccer countries, soccer is the number one sport, light-years ahead of everything else. In the US, several other sports are more popular, which drains the talent pool. Kids grow up immersed in soccer culture in places like Brazil, Argentina, Germany or Spain in a way that simply isn't as common in the US.
I think that is a contributor to the problem but the real problem is we do not yet know how to develop talent consistently in the US. FC Barcelona is easily the world reference recruiting kids around 7-8 years old and building them mentally, physically and tactically into incredible players. Something like half or more of their current roster came through la masía at some point. And something like half the Spain world cup roster plays for Barcelona.
There are soccer academies in the US but it is still relatively new and we do not have a great development model yet. Youth academies are also fairly antithetical to how talent pipelines work for the established US sports.
I mean you could say that baseball academies in Brazil aren’t good yet either, but I wouldn’t say that it’s because they “don’t know how to.”
It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular, except they already have soccer plus even basketball is growing quicker.
In America, soccer just isn’t that popular and there are so many other sports that people currently care about more.
Frankly that is a bad comparison. Soccer is incredibly popular at a youth level. The talent pool is there and the money is there. How big is the Brazilian baseball economy? As the article states there is about $1.5bn in player value in the MLS. Not to mention that our top tier talent is usually exported to Europe where there is an order of magnitude more money available for the sport. My argument is we have a big talent pool of kids who want to be successful in soccer and we have not learned how to manage it at scale. The talent market of potential players is incredibly fragmented.
I get this argument, and it is probably partially right, but is soccer really competing for the same athletes as basketball and American football? Basketball players are mostly too tall for soccer (other than goalie), and a majority of football players are way bigger than great soccer players. Baseball and hockey might compete for the same athletes, but a huge percentage of baseball and hockey players also come from other countries.
Those genetic requirements come into play at elite levels, but you need to start young, when those differences are less obvious.
You need to look at what sports an eight-year-old is playing in the backyard, what sports his Dad is excited about on the TV.
An agile, fast, coordinated kid who's coachable and wants to train hard but is going to grow up to be 5' 8" is not going to make the NFL or the NBA, but if they've got the athleticism to play in the World Cup... well, in the US that kid will be the point guard on the local high school basketball team and also play safety and wide receiver on the football team.
The difference in sports culture leads to almost no talent getting wasted.
I grew up in a European (Holland) country and as boys we'd play soccer all the time, during school on the schoolyard, after school, in the evening and the vast majority of boys in my class joined the local soccer team (me included). Even though we were a local team in a small village, scouts of slightly more important teams would sometimes come to our matches.
Basically, because soccer is so ingrained in our culture, virtually all boys play soccer at some point. That combined with all the clubs that play at different levels, and the scouting network, virtually no talent is missed.
Put differently, when a new Cruyff or Robben is born, there is a high probability that he will be found.
Women's soccer is really a different story. It has only started to take off in recent years and at least as many girls seem to play hockey.
Of course, it should be said that the only sport that really matters is Korfbal/Korfball :).
It definitely is at the youth level. I don’t think any football or basketball pros could be soccer stars, but absolutely there are kids who are star point guards on their youth basketball team but top out at 5’8”, or football players who never make it past high school but could have been great at soccer.
When we are talking about the really TOP elite of football those kids get into it at age 5. From that age on every day consists of hours of football. There are scouts looking at prepubescent kids all over the world ready to sign them.
Kids who are good at sport excel at it all throughout school years, then once they hit college age the smaller ones dont make it further in American football any more - but they still spent their childhood playing it. In e.g. Uraguay its probably opposite, the naturally heavy guys cant compete at top level soccer (Im guessing) and fall out of professional sports
I think it is less about competing for athletes and more about competing for national attention (in the form of sports viewership that turns into money and school programs).
For national teams you only need to consider outlier athletes not averages. And many of the most top athletes at sport A would do very well at sport B. If a country funnels 100% of kids into a single sport, every single genetically gifted athlete will be put through the same selection process. Imagine every single physically gifted kid going to tryouts of the same sport. That's Portugal.
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 you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US.
You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.
a country can only be so good at so many sports of this type. Every american playing basketball, or baseball, or american football, or ice hockey, is one not playing football. You have to understand that for many countries, the dream path, the default one, for a very athletic young person who is interested in team sports is soccer, from the age of 6 or younger. The entire structure above that branches outward based on this huge intake of talented children, with vast institutions of professional coaches, academies, and huge amounts of training and game time with other talented people, no matter where in the country they live.
Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business.
This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.
Also, in the US until very recently, there was no path for women athletes to make sports their career after college. Soccer could be a path to a scholarship but you were going to have to get a "real" job after that even if you wanted to continue to pursue Olympic or World Cup level goals in the sport. The NWSL is changing that but salaries are still nowhere near the men's game, nor any other male dominated professional league.
In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.
How come Ghana, a third world country with a much smaller population and GDP, and probably less organizational capacity, has eliminated the US twice at the world cup? Granted, the US finally got its revenge, but still...
So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.
It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent.
Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.
Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.
Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.
In the US, you have some special factors:
- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.
- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.
- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.
On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.
The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer.
As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great.
Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.
No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it.
Different sports.
(I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)
I find it good that US is not better at soccer. Soccer or football has gained too much importance in Europe and South America. We have seen it encourage unprecedented levels of gambling, insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football, fan violence inside and outside the stadiums, corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics, and more.
What you describe is pretty much true for every single american sport too
>unprecedented levels of gambling
Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings
>insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football
Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe
>corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics
Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music.
>fan violence inside and outside the stadiums
This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that
OK I 've never been to the US, so I believe you. Then the problems are more widespread: not only soccer, but professional sports in general are harmful in my opinion.
Everything you said (gambling, fan violence, billionaires who get money from cash strapped cities) applies to the US. If you substitute soccer with NFL, MLB, and NBA the statement stands.
He asks if it's an MLS problem but doesn't dig into the poor management decisions that persist at the MLS level, and though he does touch on the lack of relegation, and he doesn't touch at all on the US Soccer Federation's consistently poor choices for USMNT head coach. We're presently stuck with a guy who praises the players getting into constant on-field fights and each manager constantly makes nepotistic selections for team slots who are under-performers yet constantly praised, or even worse this year, who seem to be chosen for their unfocused non-game-enhancing aggression. That sort of mis-focus might work if playing in leagues where that is the norm, but world-class players and teams play with technique, and the rough play BS lasts as long as the officials allow it and doesn't win in the long term, which is where you have to aim to win championships. It's arguable if we'd even be in the Cup this time if we weren't hosting, and I'll be surprised if we get out of the group stage this time.
I think it's that the US follows a red ocean strategy. They don't compete on saturated markets, they'd rather make their own markets and be in a market of one, like NFL.
I remember they were not that bad, some years ago. But sports is already heavily covered in the USA: basket ball, american football and so forth. Establishing a new sport is harder in such an environment.
90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle.
If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.
Football (or soccer for you) can be insanely high tempo and insanely slow and boring. Depends on the game.
But the low scoring is actually one of the most important things in soccer.
A goal in soccer is so much more precious than in any other sport. It can win you the game, as almost a third of games have one or less goals in the game. So the euphoria when the team scores outweigh any "boringness" that preceded it. It can only be compared to a sudden death win in hockey (another relatively low scoring game, though a not as low as soccer).
Those not into soccer don't really understand this, and many have tried to increase the number of goals scored. But it doesn't make the game better. An 8-2 score is much more boring than a 2-0 game, as the nerve is there all game.
In addition to the sibling comment, I'd say that to enjoy the game, you really need to appreciate what's hard, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, and how much training goes into all that.
But I guess it is hard to do that later in life, if you did not grow up in a football (soccer) culture, maybe playing recreationally as a boy, and avidly following the game.
> The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show.
That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.
It's funny, at Cornell I think the men play soccer better than the woman unequivocally but at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but stupid game whereas the women play a much smarter game when it comes to controlling the space.
A men's and women's sport that can be played with the same facilities is an economic plus -- college soccer is a great way to have fun supporting your school. It's a very different situation than field hockey, which is almost exclusively a woman's sport in the US although it is a huge men's sport in India and many other countries.
The insane level of flopping with no dignity or shame, and the insane level of allowing this to happen without any penalties is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t watch soccer. Those in charge WANT soccer players to flop but I don’t understand why. It’s dishonorable and weak but the sport does nothing to stop it.
Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.
If all you see in soccer is fake flopping, that means you do not really appreciate nor understand the game, you do not understand what hard and what's easy, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, etc
The fake flopping happens sometimes, but overall it hardly detracts from the game. It would be like me saying false starts is why I don't watch the 100 m dash.
And I'd be wary of thinking a fall is fake when the referee and the linesmen who are actually on the field think otherwise. Note that soccer is mostly not supposed to be a physical contact game. It was much more like that up to the 1070s. In fact, the infamous and relentless fouling of Pelé in the 1966 World Cup was a major catalyst for the creation of the red and yellow card system.
Gamesmanship in soccer is not more egregious than in say basketball. If you look at the nonsense ronnie coleman did in his day you wouldn't be complaining about soccer players
Because we have 4 other sports that originated in the Americas: basketball, gridiron football, hockey, and baseball.
If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or we have two other sports that are totally different.
Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.
Basketball players are almost a completely separate population from soccer players. The shortest basketball player would almost be too tall for soccer.
This is definitely an exaggeration. The median NBA player is 6'5" according to [0]. Most top teams will have a few players around that height, even excluding goalkeepers (though heavily weighted towards central defenders and centre-forwards).
Even if it's directionally correct, the point made further up in the thread is very important: basketball players aren't a different population from soccer players at age 14, when they need to pick something to be serious about if they are going to end up in the big leagues. Lots of them choose basketball, turn out not big enough, but would have been perfectly fine in soccer.
"too tall for soccer" is something of a weird statement, given the large advantage height gives in the game. Even at high levels, some teams' strategy resvolves around having a couple tall guys (and many other teams keep tall guys to deal with those same strategies). It of course isn't everything, given the need for stamina, sprinting, and strength, which are hard to have all at once in a tall person. But its not uncommon for defenders and some strikers to be 6'8" or upward - average height in the premier league is 6'1" and creeping upward each year
I think in that episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" they put it much more simply - Here in South America (and Europe) soccer "is a religion".
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 necessarily head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 18 or 19.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?"
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.
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.
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.
+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.
I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either.
Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.
I can’t speak for other countries but in India cricket eclipses all other sports and drains talent. But soccer is gaining popularity recently but still long way to go.
Field Hockey is huge in India too. (Thing is India is so big that anything that is big in India is big globally!)
If you think about it, India and China already have other very popular sports. Soccer is kind of somewhat of a niche there.
Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.
> Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina.
Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.
What sport is popular in China?
Didn't read the post, but the problem is that in most top soccer countries, soccer is the number one sport, light-years ahead of everything else. In the US, several other sports are more popular, which drains the talent pool. Kids grow up immersed in soccer culture in places like Brazil, Argentina, Germany or Spain in a way that simply isn't as common in the US.
I think that is a contributor to the problem but the real problem is we do not yet know how to develop talent consistently in the US. FC Barcelona is easily the world reference recruiting kids around 7-8 years old and building them mentally, physically and tactically into incredible players. Something like half or more of their current roster came through la masía at some point. And something like half the Spain world cup roster plays for Barcelona.
There are soccer academies in the US but it is still relatively new and we do not have a great development model yet. Youth academies are also fairly antithetical to how talent pipelines work for the established US sports.
I mean you could say that baseball academies in Brazil aren’t good yet either, but I wouldn’t say that it’s because they “don’t know how to.”
It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular, except they already have soccer plus even basketball is growing quicker.
In America, soccer just isn’t that popular and there are so many other sports that people currently care about more.
Frankly that is a bad comparison. Soccer is incredibly popular at a youth level. The talent pool is there and the money is there. How big is the Brazilian baseball economy? As the article states there is about $1.5bn in player value in the MLS. Not to mention that our top tier talent is usually exported to Europe where there is an order of magnitude more money available for the sport. My argument is we have a big talent pool of kids who want to be successful in soccer and we have not learned how to manage it at scale. The talent market of potential players is incredibly fragmented.
Edit: typos
I get this argument, and it is probably partially right, but is soccer really competing for the same athletes as basketball and American football? Basketball players are mostly too tall for soccer (other than goalie), and a majority of football players are way bigger than great soccer players. Baseball and hockey might compete for the same athletes, but a huge percentage of baseball and hockey players also come from other countries.
Those genetic requirements come into play at elite levels, but you need to start young, when those differences are less obvious.
You need to look at what sports an eight-year-old is playing in the backyard, what sports his Dad is excited about on the TV.
An agile, fast, coordinated kid who's coachable and wants to train hard but is going to grow up to be 5' 8" is not going to make the NFL or the NBA, but if they've got the athleticism to play in the World Cup... well, in the US that kid will be the point guard on the local high school basketball team and also play safety and wide receiver on the football team.
In India, they'd be a cricket star.
The difference in sports culture leads to almost no talent getting wasted.
I grew up in a European (Holland) country and as boys we'd play soccer all the time, during school on the schoolyard, after school, in the evening and the vast majority of boys in my class joined the local soccer team (me included). Even though we were a local team in a small village, scouts of slightly more important teams would sometimes come to our matches.
Basically, because soccer is so ingrained in our culture, virtually all boys play soccer at some point. That combined with all the clubs that play at different levels, and the scouting network, virtually no talent is missed.
Put differently, when a new Cruyff or Robben is born, there is a high probability that he will be found.
Women's soccer is really a different story. It has only started to take off in recent years and at least as many girls seem to play hockey.
Of course, it should be said that the only sport that really matters is Korfbal/Korfball :).
It definitely is at the youth level. I don’t think any football or basketball pros could be soccer stars, but absolutely there are kids who are star point guards on their youth basketball team but top out at 5’8”, or football players who never make it past high school but could have been great at soccer.
The thing is you cannot just switch sports.
When we are talking about the really TOP elite of football those kids get into it at age 5. From that age on every day consists of hours of football. There are scouts looking at prepubescent kids all over the world ready to sign them.
Kids who are good at sport excel at it all throughout school years, then once they hit college age the smaller ones dont make it further in American football any more - but they still spent their childhood playing it. In e.g. Uraguay its probably opposite, the naturally heavy guys cant compete at top level soccer (Im guessing) and fall out of professional sports
I think it is less about competing for athletes and more about competing for national attention (in the form of sports viewership that turns into money and school programs).
For national teams you only need to consider outlier athletes not averages. And many of the most top athletes at sport A would do very well at sport B. If a country funnels 100% of kids into a single sport, every single genetically gifted athlete will be put through the same selection process. Imagine every single physically gifted kid going to tryouts of the same sport. That's Portugal.
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 you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US.
You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.
a country can only be so good at so many sports of this type. Every american playing basketball, or baseball, or american football, or ice hockey, is one not playing football. You have to understand that for many countries, the dream path, the default one, for a very athletic young person who is interested in team sports is soccer, from the age of 6 or younger. The entire structure above that branches outward based on this huge intake of talented children, with vast institutions of professional coaches, academies, and huge amounts of training and game time with other talented people, no matter where in the country they live.
Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business.
This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.
I think the rest of the world is rapidly catching up whent it comes to girls.
Also, in the US until very recently, there was no path for women athletes to make sports their career after college. Soccer could be a path to a scholarship but you were going to have to get a "real" job after that even if you wanted to continue to pursue Olympic or World Cup level goals in the sport. The NWSL is changing that but salaries are still nowhere near the men's game, nor any other male dominated professional league.
In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.
Not American. Don’t live in US. The outside impression I get is that the game simply isn’t one of the kids’ default street sports.
the US has a large relatively recent influx of Latino populations, and they play a lot of soccer, and in a number of cultures also baseball
How come Ghana, a third world country with a much smaller population and GDP, and probably less organizational capacity, has eliminated the US twice at the world cup? Granted, the US finally got its revenge, but still...
So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.
> Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.
But would you say the same about the basketball where the US is dominating both the men and woment tournaments?
It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent.
Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.
Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.
Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.
In the US, you have some special factors:
- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.
- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.
- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.
On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.
The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer.
As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great.
Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.
The is probably the most significant reason. The top athletes are pulled into other sports which have higher cultural status and financial rewards.
"Soccer is like the metric system of sports."
No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it.
Different sports.
(I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)
I find it good that US is not better at soccer. Soccer or football has gained too much importance in Europe and South America. We have seen it encourage unprecedented levels of gambling, insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football, fan violence inside and outside the stadiums, corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics, and more.
The United States experiences the same sort of issues, just with different sports.
What you describe is pretty much true for every single american sport too
>unprecedented levels of gambling
Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings
>insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football
Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe
>corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics
Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music.
>fan violence inside and outside the stadiums
This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that
OK I 've never been to the US, so I believe you. Then the problems are more widespread: not only soccer, but professional sports in general are harmful in my opinion.
Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions fans have something to say about fan violence.
Everything you said (gambling, fan violence, billionaires who get money from cash strapped cities) applies to the US. If you substitute soccer with NFL, MLB, and NBA the statement stands.
He asks if it's an MLS problem but doesn't dig into the poor management decisions that persist at the MLS level, and though he does touch on the lack of relegation, and he doesn't touch at all on the US Soccer Federation's consistently poor choices for USMNT head coach. We're presently stuck with a guy who praises the players getting into constant on-field fights and each manager constantly makes nepotistic selections for team slots who are under-performers yet constantly praised, or even worse this year, who seem to be chosen for their unfocused non-game-enhancing aggression. That sort of mis-focus might work if playing in leagues where that is the norm, but world-class players and teams play with technique, and the rough play BS lasts as long as the officials allow it and doesn't win in the long term, which is where you have to aim to win championships. It's arguable if we'd even be in the Cup this time if we weren't hosting, and I'll be surprised if we get out of the group stage this time.
It's the culture.
I'm from Spain and living in Mexico. Football in these countries is almost like a religion.
I remember when in grad school, there were two casual sports leagues for the grad students: Softball and soccer.
The best softball teams were the MBA and law students, who were mostly American.
But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.
That is because you call it "soccer"?
I think it's that the US follows a red ocean strategy. They don't compete on saturated markets, they'd rather make their own markets and be in a market of one, like NFL.
I remember they were not that bad, some years ago. But sports is already heavily covered in the USA: basket ball, american football and so forth. Establishing a new sport is harder in such an environment.
[dead]
What are you talking about? They've been world champ repeatedly.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-histo...
The qualifier is literally the sub-headline and is mentioned several times in the article.
Yet it is not in the submission. How am I to know you all assume male sporting events?
My problem is I can’t stay interested for long.
Yes, it’s possible that it’s a “me” problem.
90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle.
If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.
Football (or soccer for you) can be insanely high tempo and insanely slow and boring. Depends on the game.
But the low scoring is actually one of the most important things in soccer.
A goal in soccer is so much more precious than in any other sport. It can win you the game, as almost a third of games have one or less goals in the game. So the euphoria when the team scores outweigh any "boringness" that preceded it. It can only be compared to a sudden death win in hockey (another relatively low scoring game, though a not as low as soccer).
Those not into soccer don't really understand this, and many have tried to increase the number of goals scored. But it doesn't make the game better. An 8-2 score is much more boring than a 2-0 game, as the nerve is there all game.
In addition to the sibling comment, I'd say that to enjoy the game, you really need to appreciate what's hard, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, and how much training goes into all that.
But I guess it is hard to do that later in life, if you did not grow up in a football (soccer) culture, maybe playing recreationally as a boy, and avidly following the game.
> The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show.
That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.
It's funny, at Cornell I think the men play soccer better than the woman unequivocally but at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but stupid game whereas the women play a much smarter game when it comes to controlling the space.
A men's and women's sport that can be played with the same facilities is an economic plus -- college soccer is a great way to have fun supporting your school. It's a very different situation than field hockey, which is almost exclusively a woman's sport in the US although it is a huge men's sport in India and many other countries.
> That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms.
I’ve never heard that, in fact there are more boys who play in America than girls.
The insane level of flopping with no dignity or shame, and the insane level of allowing this to happen without any penalties is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t watch soccer. Those in charge WANT soccer players to flop but I don’t understand why. It’s dishonorable and weak but the sport does nothing to stop it.
Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.
If all you see in soccer is fake flopping, that means you do not really appreciate nor understand the game, you do not understand what hard and what's easy, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, etc
The fake flopping happens sometimes, but overall it hardly detracts from the game. It would be like me saying false starts is why I don't watch the 100 m dash.
And I'd be wary of thinking a fall is fake when the referee and the linesmen who are actually on the field think otherwise. Note that soccer is mostly not supposed to be a physical contact game. It was much more like that up to the 1070s. In fact, the infamous and relentless fouling of Pelé in the 1966 World Cup was a major catalyst for the creation of the red and yellow card system.
Gamesmanship in soccer is not more egregious than in say basketball. If you look at the nonsense ronnie coleman did in his day you wouldn't be complaining about soccer players
Because we have 4 other sports that originated in the Americas: basketball, gridiron football, hockey, and baseball.
If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or we have two other sports that are totally different.
Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.
Basketball players are almost a completely separate population from soccer players. The shortest basketball player would almost be too tall for soccer.
This is definitely an exaggeration. The median NBA player is 6'5" according to [0]. Most top teams will have a few players around that height, even excluding goalkeepers (though heavily weighted towards central defenders and centre-forwards).
Even if it's directionally correct, the point made further up in the thread is very important: basketball players aren't a different population from soccer players at age 14, when they need to pick something to be serious about if they are going to end up in the big leagues. Lots of them choose basketball, turn out not big enough, but would have been perfectly fine in soccer.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1btj60p/oc...
"too tall for soccer" is something of a weird statement, given the large advantage height gives in the game. Even at high levels, some teams' strategy resvolves around having a couple tall guys (and many other teams keep tall guys to deal with those same strategies). It of course isn't everything, given the need for stamina, sprinting, and strength, which are hard to have all at once in a tall person. But its not uncommon for defenders and some strikers to be 6'8" or upward - average height in the premier league is 6'1" and creeping upward each year
It is extremely uncommon, in fact, to the extent that the English premier league doesn't have a single player "6'8" or upward".
Lots of 6'4" players, though, which is comfortably tall enough for professional basketball.
https://www.zonalsports.com/ranking/tallest-premier-league-p...