re: Are American players good enough?

I just don't see how academies could ever be seen as legitimate until soccer, as a career in the US, is seen as a legitimate career path. If you could make a decent living playing third division pro soccer in the US, and the college game wasn't producing players who are up to US top flight standards, then demand for academies would probably be there. Don't get me wrong, I totally agree academies SHOULD be the way to go, but right now they're not for most players in this country. There just isn't a demand for them because the jobs aren't there. When the jobs are there, the academies will be, too.

The main difference is that in Europe and the UK, professional soccer is seen as a legit career path no different than plumbing or law. The reason that is the case is because players are in demand due to the multiple tiers of pro soccer.

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soccer just doesn't require as much explosion as basketball

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Yea, it does. I say this as someone that played both sports competitively my whole life, and now play high level amateur soccer. I will say that, playing pickup basketball with your buddies probably does recruit more fast twitch fibers than playing pickup soccer with your buddies. But at the competitive level, it's about the same. If you don't think soccer at a high level is just as explosive as basketball at a high level, it's because you've never played either at a high level.

Oh really? Not even olympic lifting?

Soccer looks less explosive as a spectator because it takes place over a larger area. Again, I say this from experience. Do you?

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Again, I say this from experience. Do you?

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no, but that's somewhat irrelevant

i've never played pro football, but i know peyton manning is less athletic than patrick willis

ronaldo, who i love so dearly, had a 30" one-step vertical leap. this from one of the most athletic/explosive soccer players on earth. obviously he's not going to be explosive (objectively) from a pure strength analysis b/c he relies on too much anaerobic activity.

but we do have 3/4 court sprint data, which is 71.25 feet. the 25m sprint or ronaldo is comparable, b/c that's right at 82 feet. ronaldo ran the 25m in 3.61 seconds. guys at the NBA combine have gone sum 3.00 in a longer sprint (by about 15%)

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Oh really? Not even olympic lifting? Soccer looks less explosive as a spectator because it takes place over a larger area. Again, I say this from experience. Do you?

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Your anecdotal experience is meaningless in this context, as you haven't played at the professional level in either sport, and to intimate that your experiences in either sport is somehow indicative of the muscle makeup of the majority of athletes playing each sport is spurious.

In the book the Sportsgene, David Epstein interviewed a Danish scientist who did biopsies of Danish top level athletes. He found the majority of soccer pros had fewer fast-twitch muscles than the average Danish man. His conclusion was that the training techniques used by the club, FC Copenhagen, selected out faster players, as those players had chronic injuries due to the training style.

Though we shouldn't pretend that the data from Danish pros is applicable to every league, until I see some data otherwise, I'm inclined to side with the data at hand. When you combine this with data in Soccernomics that says a successful player needs to run a lot and have to reach a threshold speed 7 m/sec, which equals a 100m time of 15 secs. Then when you look at the top speed data from the last World Cup, you see that the fastest speed was posted by Chicharito, who at his fastest was timed at 32.15 km/h, or for reference, a 100 meter time of 11.2, if we assume a constant speed.

When you combine this data, it leads me to conclude that there is a prevalence of slow-twitch athletes at the top level of the sport. At least until data shows otherwise.

I have no doubt that professionals are incredible athletes, but the data would indicate that the training methods at the elite level selects for athletes with more slow-twitch muscle fiber. Given the problems some speedsters have had with muscle injuries, the training, and not the sport itself, selects for these types of athletes.

This is why I'm skeptical of arguments about the level of American athletes playing the sport. The likelihood is that a player with more fast-twitch muscle fiber will not make it past the youth level, hence the why the growing popularity of the sport will not improve the athleticism of the average player, at least according to typical American definitions of athletic.

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So are we saying people who are good at sprinting shouldn't play soccer?

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No. What I would say is that traditional training methods at the youth level lead to more muscle injuries in players with more fast-twitch muscle fiber, leading to less practice and game time, decreasing their chances of reaching the professional level. There have been plenty of fast players who were fortunate not to get injuries during crucial stages of development, so they developed normally, usually playing at forward positions.

There needs to be more data, but my initial conclusion is that teams need to tailor their training program for all types of athletes.