re: Spot on about the US and future World Cups

quote:

---

Elite athletes don’t matter, look at Messi

---

I really wish people would stop making this comparison. Messi is an alien. He's 1 of 1 and no one before him has ever possessed his entire skillset or footballing brain. I think we need to operate under the assumption that we aren't going to produce one of those.

Elite athletes do matter. Kyle Walker, Virgil Van Dijk, Sergio Ramos, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe... I mean the list goes on and on and on. We've got the largest population of sporting age males in a multi sport nation. It's simple math that if you took the baseball travel ball structure even in the southeast and snapped your fingers and all of those kids were now playing soccer, we'd be a world power within a decade.

The difference is that there is no structure, so even if you had 1,000 kids in every county playing the game from a young age, they aren't getting quality coaching.

The flip side of that coin however is that from that 1,000 a handful of them are going to figure it out on their own to an extent and be obsessed with it and always have a ball at their feet. A percentage of those kids will grow up to be elite athletes.

The math is the math, but until it's a widespread game played by 12 year olds instead of 5 year olds, then the only pathway to the big boy table is to make sure the 12 year olds that are playing are getting proper coaching

It stands to reason that there are thousands of 6'5"-6'7" guys in this country that grew up playing basketball that were never good enough to play past a small college. Now imagine those genetics in goal. Now imagine the ones that were good enough to make it into the NBA and imagine those genetics in goal. The argument is a tired one and usually presented as a stupid one, like we should just start teaching Lebron James how to stop a 75 mph free kick form the top of the box. The real hypothetical to me is what if some of these guys that won the genetic lottery, which America has more of than any other nation, starting playing when they were 5 and took it serious. That's how you become a global power. It's not going to get to that point without structure though and I don't think we can have our cake and eat it too. Any rise of soccer is going to coincide with a decline in american football, I don't think the two can coexist and the long term injury data is going to damn the future of football in the long run