re: This is a problem

We'd win the WC if Chase started over Altidore

quote:

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2020 opinion, Ja’Mar Chase, exhibit A

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No. The skills to succeed at American football are different than the skills to succeed at soccer, even with respect to body profile of the players. The sport tends to favor athletes with type I muscle fibers over fast-twitch muscle profiles. In addition, a player needs elite level technique and all the things that entails.

Even if our "best" athletes play the sport, the danger of letting their athletic skills override their technical skills is to produce a whole of very specific type players who grew up favoring athleticism over technical ability. On one end, you get the genre of player that uses their athleticism excessively. The English game was littered with these sorts of players at one point. Still, out of this group, you had supreme athletes with superb technical skills, like Sterling and Bale. The next generation had players like Ox, where the technical and athletic skills were there, but the mentality and (most of all in Ox's case, luck) were missing. I'd place Alex Iwobi in this class too, among others. The latest iteration includes players like Jadon Sancho, who is so superb on the ball that his technical and athleticism seem fused together. I couldn't even tell you if he was super fast, given the degree of separation he gets from his ball-handling alone. Bakayo Saka is another player who is going to be in this mold, though I'm certain he isn't on the athletic level of someone like Theo Walcott.

The point of any development program is to develop technical skills to the degree that they allow players to fully express their athletic ability. This method allows you to produce players who succeed in spite of their athletic and physical limitations, so you get players like Santi Cazorla, among many others, who developed technical skills to compensate for their limitations, and you can get players who can use their athletic ability to accentuate their technical skills, rather than, as in the English case, use their athletic skills to hide or mitigate their technical deficiencies.

Last night, Ethan Dobbelaere became the 24th American teenager to play in MLS this season.