Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

The US's best soccer players probably are found in water. You know, divers. That's what the game is about, right?

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

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The US's best soccer players probably are found in water. You know, divers. That's what the game is about, right?

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Enter obvious poker-related "flop" joke here.

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

I don't think it's overstated. If you take a great athelete and combine it with a high competitveness, why wouldn't they become a great soccer player? Although, I'm thinking more of WRs and DBs than basketball players.

Jerry Rice was one of the most competitve atheletes in the NFL. You're saying he wouldn't be a great soccer player had he decided to concentrate on it first?

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

I think OP is insane. I would say most people around the world would concede the America overall has the best Atheletes and without question the best atheletic training.

I could very easily see many guards, WR's, DB's, smaller RB's, CF'ers, some SS.

Also I could easily see some football players playing soccer if they knew that was what they would play instead of football. They wouldn't lift as much. Imagine Urlacher playing soccer. I could.


Bottom line, we would dominate at soccer if it was our main sport, and I firmly believe that. I will however agree to an extent with OP that to assume someone like AI would be the worlds greatest is absurd, because he has nothing to really base it on. But I think Iverson would have been a very good player.

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

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Steve Nash would be the greatest soccer player ever.

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Wasn't his dad a pro soccer player? You'd think that if he would have been a great soccer player, he would have taken that route.

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

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A young Hakeem Olajuwon would be the greatest goalkeeper ever.

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Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

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Because soccer is boring, cheap, and not complicated to play at all. It's basically an excuse to wear the kids out when they're very young and give them some athletic training - but there's not much real emphasis on becoming good at soccer.

Basketball, baseball, and football, OTOH, are very difficult to play when younger, often requiring different equipment and rules.


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I don't buy any of this.. at all. It's BS. Football and hockey are the only "difficult" sports to play, in terms of equipment, rules, and all that. Basketball is ridiculously easy. You get a ball. You go to the playground or to any of the kids with a hoop in his driveway, and shoot. Drive through any suburb during the summer and kids are outside shooting hoops. For organized leagues, it's not a problem for most towns because every school has a basketball court where leagues can play.

Baseball, while more equipment is needed, isn't all that complicated at a young age. Boys start playing catch at an early age. Kids start playing organized baseball when they're 6 years old. Little League is everywhere. It's easy, it's fun.

Soccer is also pretty easy, especially at the pee wee level.. and the games are usually ugly follow the ball trains. But you get better training as you rise up the ranks just like any other sport.

JoA's remarks are a large part of it. Another major reason is culture and social pressures. The 3 big sports are more popular on a national scale, so they're drawn to that. That makes sense. But there's still some messed up "soccer bashing" going on in a lot of places. A good example is my hometown. Our youth soccer league is a joint league with the neighboring town, also our high school "rival" town. The league is wildly popular, as there's a large Portuguese population where I grew up. Each town has about an equal number of kids in the league.

But when you get to the HS level, a weird thing happens. The rivals soccer program is very successful. Div I, constantly competing, a full freshman, JV, and varsity squad. Their football team was strong, too. In my HS, football reign supremes. They call soccer players "soccer fagz".. the football coach is notorious for egging his players on to pick on the soccer team. This sort of peer pressure really hurt our soccer program. How else do you explain how two towns, with an equal amount of kids in the town league, with an equal distribution of talent, have one HS team playing DivI at a high level while the other has trouble fielding a team some years?

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

I said, very young, kidcolin.

I mean 6 years old - basketball is really difficult at that age. Boys may start playing catch in baseball, but kids have a hard time playing a real game all by themselves until 8-10. This is also the age at which they can start playing basketball.

And yeah, the perception of soccer as a weak sport doesn't help - I think JoA's reasons for why soccer falls behind in later years are also dead on. I'm just saying that at a VERY young age, soccer is a good sport for children.

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soc
 

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I think OP is insane. I would say most people around the world would concede the America overall has the best Atheletes and without question the best atheletic training.

I could very easily see many guards, WR's, DB's, smaller RB's, CF'ers, some SS.


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Well I'm glad you feel you can speak for the rest of the world. I have a feeling many might not agree with your statement.

You are grossly mis-representing my ideas. I never said that NO athletes from the major sports would do well at soccer. I said that opinions such as those held by people like Bill Simmons OVERSTATE how much of an impact this would have. I mean Allen Iverson undisputedly the greatest ever?

Also, I was primarily talking about very tall basketball players. The guys mentioned by Simmons, Anderson and Marion, were 6'10 and 6'9 respectively. At those heights the chances of them possessing the foot coordination to be world class players would be slim.

Re: Do Americans Overestimate How Great Other Athletes Would be at Soccer?
 

I think this is a pretty common mistake people make; they tend to overestimate how well a world class performer at one thing would do at another. Sometimes they can do very well, other times not. You used to hear die hard basketball fans say Michael Jordan would be great at baseball or golf. Well, he's not. Great athlete, competed at two different pro sports, but he was only great in one. Sometimes it is hype, or seeing something impressive that leads to people overestimating the athlete, like people who think Michelle Wie will be a great golfer on the men's tour.

The fact soccer is cheap and widely played also makes this less likely. For the same reason there are a lot of great basketball players in the US, there are a lot of great soccer players around the world. So you have a combination of the great athletes playing it, and they can play a lot. So I would assume (I don't know the sport really) that it is a lot harder to be world class at the sport than a lot of Americans think.

I do think certain athletes could do different things and might have been great at something else had they played that growing up. So Iverson might have been a great soccer player. I don't know and don't really care, but I think the writer is making a huge mistake assuming, that just because Iverson is a great athlete, and is a great basketball player, that because he is so great in the writer's pfavorite sport he would be better than Pele. Come on.

I do think it is impressive to see an athlete do something outside of his sport or to do multiple sports. Sometimes when you see a great athlete you are just impressed at how they can do things outside of their specialty, and I think this is the case for all sorts of world class athletes, depending on their specialty and body type of course.