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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

by SamBam 4mo ago

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 usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18. 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.

hawaiianbrah 4mo ago
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.
- hibikir 4mo ago
  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.
- SamBam 4mo ago
  So leaving aside whether 5-6 times is "a few," the bigger issue is the length of the season. Varsity soccer season in the US is usually just four months, August-November. Spring season (with no games) is February-April. During that season, NCAA places strict limitations on how often teams can practice: Division I and II teams are allowed only up to 8 hours per week, with just 4 of those being coach-supervised! [1] Finally there is no organized playing for all of January, May, June and July. So even for a player in a D1 team, they are training much, much less of the year than a 15-year-old on a farm team in Europe. 1. https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fall-spring-rules/#ncaa-college-soccer-spring-season-rules https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fal...
  - dogmatism 4mo ago
    [dead]
- skywhopper 4mo ago
  What’s intriguing to me is that several American colleges end up becoming magnets for European and South American soccer players. My midwestern mid-tier alma mater’s soccer team is 95% non-American.
harrall 4mo ago
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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Qem 4mo ago
  > The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on). It appears the sports industry in US skewed local preferences toward hardware-intensive sports, that sell lots of gear. Poor children can start playing soccer stuffing crumpled paper in plastic bags to create a makeshift ball, and using spaced sandals as makeshift goalposts. Minimal hardware requirements. It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera. Basketball comes closer to soccer in this regard.
  - skywhopper 4mo ago
    This is way off. You only need a ball to play American football. Or a ball and bat to play baseball. Yes, the organized competitive versions have more gear involved, but so does organized soccer/football.
  - toast0 4mo ago
    A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat if you're hitting a light enough ball. It you can scrounge up a tennis ball, they work pretty well for street baseball. Don't need gloves, bases can be whatever you can agree on. Of course, it you have something vaguely soccerball shaped, you can play kickball with improvised bases rather than playing soccer.
    - bilbo0s 4mo ago
      >A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat Right around the 80’s and 90’s the idea of zero-tolerance youth crime policies swept the US. Right around the same time the popularity of baseball began a decline in the US. It went from being a universally played ‘pickup culture’ sport, to a sparsely played ‘pay to play’ sport. Now I’m not gonna say the need for 8 or 9 boys to roam around a neighborhood with a giant stick looking for a place to play was the reason the ‘pickup culture’ games died. But I will say that it was probably a lot safer for those boys to just go to a basketball court and wait their turn in a ‘pickup culture’ game that did not require a giant stick or bat.
dh2022 4mo ago
+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.
drewmate 4mo ago
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.
- surgical_fire 4mo ago
  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.
  - temp_praneshp 4mo ago
    Basketball?
  - skywhopper 4mo ago
    I can’t speak to its actual popularity, but when I visit Europe and local folks hear I’m from the US, I’m surprised how often they are interested in talking about the NBA. Maybe it’s more pronounced in Eastern Europe where a lot of basketball talent has made it to the NBA over the years.
otherme123 4mo ago
> 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?"
- karp773 4mo ago
  If you have a choice (an offer) to be a pro player at 18, it means you had already given up on school by 12 or younger.
- PearlRiver 4mo ago
  Most soccer players tend to retire in their late 30s so they are better off pursuing an education after their pro athlete career. Of course the best are multi millionaires who never have to work and can live from passive income.
  - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
    Not necessarily true, there are lots of careers where have been a professional footballer is the qualification in and of itself without having anything to do with football. E.g. sales, sufficient people find talking to an ex-footballer impressive enough to open doors that getting a job in sales is easy. And of course there's always the coaching/management path.
- hunterpayne 4mo ago
  Try joining a serious club between 12 to 14. Most soccer players that turn pro left school years ago. Sports and education aren't linked outside of the US.
- holgerschurig 4mo ago
  The most important factor however is that many EU countries don't have a US-style college system. E.g. in Germany we have a very different schooling system and a very different job education system. Even the university system is quite a bit different to the US-style. Some jobs (e.g. bookkeeper) here are apprenticeships where in the US you'd go to some community college. So there might be european soccer players around that don't have a "college" but still have learned a job from the basics. That said: a german source says that only 19.6% of the soccer stars (Bundesliga) have learned a common job.
drivebyhooting 4mo ago
This is pretty much true for all high level competition in the US. It’s extremely hard to get good at chess. It’s extremely hard to get good at math. It’s extremely hard to get good at gymnastics. It’s extremely hard to get good at Piano. Meanwhile, in China or Russia, there are dedicated schools for mass producing concert, pianist, etc.
jasonwatkinspdx 4mo ago
Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc. And often enough adults join in because they were once the kids too. So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly. One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol. Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference. Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.
- Symbiote 4mo ago
  Cricket is even more accessible: you need a bat (which could be a piece of wood), but you don't need space. You can compress the game to play in a 1.5m wide alleyway between two buildings. I think this is why it became so popular in India etc.
  - airstrike 4mo ago
    Soccer is still more accessible. You don't even need a ball. As a kid, you'll find yourself kicking around a crushed coke can with friends and trying to score.
    - ramblerman 4mo ago
      This is a silly form of no true Scotsman, you don't create a Messi if he had been kicking a coke can around.
  - 4mo ago
confidantlake 4mo ago
I think you are overlooking the more obvious answer. All the talent gets sucked up by the nfl/nba/mlb.
- NotGMan 4mo ago
  Why not both? And sprinkle in some cultural differences (soccer is not that popular in the USA, so it's self-reinforcing).
- Detrytus 4mo ago
  Well, nfl/nba are focused on big guys, 6’3 and above. In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap. And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all.
  - dpark 4mo ago
    > In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap. This is untrue and also just silly. The talent pools for horse jockeys and NBA players don't overlap. The talent pool for soccer and football is probably 90% overlap. Smaller players are certainly more likely to be successful in soccer than football but tall players can do great in soccer and average height guys can do well in football. > And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all. Come on. Baseball doesn't demand the same athleticism as soccer but these guys are still elite athletes and there are plenty of stories of both MLB and NFL offering positions to the same players.
    - Detrytus 4mo ago
      Taller players do great in soccer, to a point. I mean, goalkeepers are the tallest, typically, about 6'4, 6'5. For field players, they usually max out around 6'3, but that's only for certain specialized positions like a striker, or central defender. Above that and you are too big and too slow, smaller players will quite literally run circles around you. I think overall average height of soccer player is below 6 feet. Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time is only 5'7 - that should tell you something.
troupo 4mo ago
> For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." This is true for most sports (and activities) in the US. Additionally, the US doesn't have the concept of unstructured play, as many (most?) kids are fully depend on the parent or the school to take them places, since most of the US is so car-dependent.
misterinfo 4mo ago
At my high school and college, the best athletes were playing Football or basketball not soccer. If some of those athletic running backs were playing soccer all their life they would've been a problem.
- vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
  The physical attributes needed for soccer are quite different from football or basketball. I don't think any football or basketball players would be good at soccer even if they tried.
  - hunterpayne 4mo ago
    Nope, not true at all. The average NFL CB makes the best athletes in soccer or rugby look like furniture movers, even in drills designed for soccer. Same for the majority NBA PGs. There is a lot of overlap in team sports for specific types of athleticism. The average pro you see on TV could usually beat the best player in your hometown at whatever sport they played. And not just beat, but beat badly. There are NFL DTs that can do 360 dunks and run a 40 in 4.6sec (at 300lbs) which is faster than your average pro striker in soccer.
    - vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
      That makes no sense. Some NFL guys may be fast but that's not all you need in soccer. You need to be quick but you also need ball control, endurance and in general understand tactics in depth. A lot of top athletes will probably do pretty well in a lot of sports but they won't be world class in another sport. Even in motorsports Indycar or NASCAR drivers don't do well in Formula 1 despite them looking very similar.
  - theklub 4mo ago
    Lebron as a goalie? Or hell half the nba...
- bjohnson225 4mo ago
  If those running backs played soccer they'd all be asked to slim down. Soccer requires a mix of strength, agility and endurance.
qingcharles 4mo ago
Isn't soccer a mostly women's sport in the USA? Do boys even play it at all? The USA women's team is world class, probably for this reason. In the UK boys mostly play soccer while girls traditionally played netball (basketball).
- gbear605 4mo ago
  Soccer is extremely widespread and played by both boys and girls at a young age (up until puberty or so), but there definitely is a gender gap after that. I'd guess that there are a lot of other sports that are almost solely played by boys, so boys tend to drift away from soccer, while there are fewer options for girls. (Though there are some - lacrosse and softball for a couple examples.)
  - stephencanon 4mo ago
    Field hockey is almost exclusively a girls sport in the US, while boys have (American) football in the fall. Both draw from the potential pool of soccer players in US middle and high schools.
ignoramous 4mo ago
Despite the fairly similar cultural and financial incentives at play in Europe & South America, France and Spain (Portugal to an extent, as well) pretty much lead the footballing world in terms of elite talent. Their depth is ridiculous. For France, their sporting renaissance, if we can call it that, started way earlier in the late 1960s with what we'd call "DEI" today: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-craft-how-de-gaulle-shaped-frances-inclusive-olympic-sport-infrastructure https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-... For Spain, correctly focusing on developing in-game intelligence and skill was key in out-competing stronger & taller teams (at a time when rapidly improving football pitches were proving great for playing positional & possession-based game): A very 1970s Dutch way of playing kick-started by Johan Cruyff in 1990s at Barcelona, and converted into concrete results for the national team by Luis Aragones & Vincente del Bosque in 2000s/2010s: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that-changed-spain-and-the-one-yet-to-arrive-in-england https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that...
rauljordan2020 4mo ago
I'm from Honduras, which is also quite a poor country, and the sport (soccer) is all we do and all everyone talks about. It's a core part of our society and a core part just what one does as a human, so since we are kids we think of always kicking a ball around no matter where you are, even fashioning balls from socks tied together or rubber bands, and we all learn how to control them really well even barefoot, in difficult terrain, in rain, sun, shine, anything. It isn't a structured activity. Coming to the US I realized so many American sports need a ton of setup...lots of expensive equipment, a full squad, a special field (baseball), etc. and not just something you can do easily on the street with your friends. It isn't "lived and breathed" as it is where I'm from, and we have so many incredible players. Unfortunately, we are a poor country so the best players won't become professionals and instead pursue other careers, so our national team isn't great, but I know guys that could easily be pros in Europe if they went down that path
- _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
  In the US we had the same but for pickup American football. We played on the street in the neighborhood every night, and had standing games at a kind centralized empty field on Sat/Sunday where everyone know to just show up and there'd be a game, or after it rained (mud football). Only equipment was a football or a nerf football. Kids are kids :)
  - 1659447091 4mo ago
    > We played on the street in the neighborhood every night Street light to utility box
  - rauljordan2020 4mo ago
    I would argue it isn't the same. Not every single American male grow up playing American football. It is fragmented across the country. However, for us, almost every single human has the experience of soccer being an integral part of our lives at every stage of it, from toddler to adulthood. It's so pervasive it is part of our core vocabulary and idioms, the govt shuts down when real madrid vs barcelona play, and everyone comes together over a single cause, no matter young or old. Soccer covers every aspect of our lives over there.
dogmatism 4mo ago
> 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 wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality? Also, now with NIL etc, college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league
- SamBam 4mo ago
  > wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality? Of course. American varsity soccer players play ~5 times a week for four months a year, August through November. February through April is the Spring season and varsity teams are forbidden from playing too much. D1 and D2 teams can only train 8 hours per week, of which at most 4 hours per week may be coached! And then 4 months of the year are off-season and there is no structured training at all! This is a ridiculously small amount of time compared to a 15 year old Spanish kid playing in a farm team. And they're doing this part-time stuff until they're 22 or 23. A typical European professional player would have been playing full time since they were 16. > college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league ... except no where near at the level of European farm teams.
  - dogmatism 4mo ago
    Ok I don't know about soccer But I know about DI Track and Wrestling. And they're essentially off like 2 weeks a year. This forbidden stuff is a fiction.
nchmy 4mo ago
Yes, this is it.
thehoff 4mo ago
What about baseball travel teams? Our kid plays travel soccer and it is expensive no doubt but our baseball parent friends pay more. I don't hear anyone complaining that baseball is pay to play. Also, from what I hear hockey is also extremely expensive. I've heard that you can't leave a sporting goods store without spending at least $1,000 on gear alone for a season. I've yet to hear anyone complain that hockey is pay to play. I think the other commenter has it right, most kids just gravitate towards American Football, Baseball, or Basketball. And in the state I live in, of probably the top five soccer teams, one is a private school, the rest are public. Edit: I don't know if other sports are like this but so many soccer parents are just extremely unrealistic/toxic. So many think they have the next superstar, questioning the coach on their child's play time, whey their kids didn't get placed on higher leveled teams, questioning why a coach is running practices certain ways.
- brigandish 4mo ago
  Isn't the contention that, because football is pay to play in the US, the US isn't that good compared to places that it isn't pay to play? Baseball, basketball, American football are all sports with much less international participation, and generally require pay to play elsewhere at around the same level as in the US, because of the way the sports are. There's no refutation possible from that.
  - thehoff 4mo ago
    I do agree its expensive but so many point to just the cost being the big issue. How is it (on an international stage) our US women's national team is consistently good? The teams/clubs in our region charge the same for boys/girls. Related, I know the two biggest clubs by us do offer some financial aid (50% to 100% off). Then there are clubs that don't charge as much. From our kid's team its the end of the season and we have 4 families leaving to another club that is easily 8x cheaper. So those types of teams/clubs do exist. Not to mention school teams don't charge to play.
ma2kx 4mo ago
I don't think the unstructured format directly contributes to the playing strength but rather attracts more player to play in a local club. Even in the town where I life with less than 100'000 people there are 10 clubs, 168 teams and nearly 3000 (mostly semi-professional) soccer player. Of course not all of them are young anymore but extrapolate this numbers to the population of a country it becomes a huge talent pool available for the major clubs. And compared to the US there is a far more dense competition as any state has its own national league and on top are the Champions, Europe and Conference league. So every major soccer team plays in a national and a europene league at the same time and thus the players get of course much more routine. But hey, we suck at baseball and basketball.
karp773 4mo ago
It's not about structured/unstructured play at all. Basketball and hockey teams in the very same USA are world class. It's about in which sports in the country the pro clubs pay top money. It's that simple. It sets up the incentives for families, and everything else follows. 99.99% of the kids who play in the street have a lot of fun but will never make it anywhere near pro sports.
- SamBam 4mo ago
  Basketball is the only sport in the US that has a similar level of hundreds of hours a year of unstructured play, so it makes sense that the US is great at it. Hockey, who is the US competing against? Canada. No other country in the world takes it particularly seriously, so of course the US is one of the top two countries... (I often tell each of my two kids that they're one of my top two kids.)
amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
I think the real answer is money. If there were as many soccer fans wanting to watch games on TV as there are baseball, football, and basketball, the US would be in the top rankings.
glitchc 4mo ago
How proficient a country is at a given sport is derived from the size of the feeder pool. Baring extremely rare exceptions, top talent is strongly correlated with deep feeder pools. Sports are always cultural: Kids grow up idolizing the stars of their childhood, and those stars are drawn from the sports their parents and community expose them to. In Europe, soccer is the biggest sport, everyone grows up watching soccer on weekends and so the feeder pool (i.e. the pool of kids who are drawn to the game) is much greater than other sports. Deep feeder pool allows the system to filter relentlessly to tease out the best. In the US, and North America in general, kids grow up watching football, basketball, baseball and hockey. So that's what kids end up playing, and all of those sports have deep feeder pools. Soccer not so much.
akudha 4mo ago
Isn’t the costing money part true for other sports too, in the U.S? I remember there was a report on how much it costs for kids to play sports (more perfect union video, I think) and it isn’t cheap. It is made worse by (what else?) private equity
dataflow 4mo ago
What about women's soccer?
rurban 4mo ago
Exactly. The same reasons why US players will never be better at table tennis also. It's the capitalist school and club system, which forbids any advantage in the early years. If you have to pay, you won't train that often.
j_w 4mo ago
I don't know why any reply disagrees with this. Look at basketball in the US. The best players will tell you all they did as a kid was play basketball. You can go to anywhere somewhat populated and the outdoor courts are in use almost all the time school is not in session for pickup play. Outside of structured practice (if they are on a team), many kids are still playing pickup games or shooting casually. Soccer fields rarely get use outside of structured play. Kids that play soccer in the US just don't play as much, so their skills are (on average) much worse.

by SamBam 4mo ago

hawaiianbrah 4mo ago

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.

hibikir 4mo ago
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.
SamBam 4mo ago
So leaving aside whether 5-6 times is "a few," the bigger issue is the length of the season. Varsity soccer season in the US is usually just four months, August-November. Spring season (with no games) is February-April. During that season, NCAA places strict limitations on how often teams can practice: Division I and II teams are allowed only up to 8 hours per week, with just 4 of those being coach-supervised! [1] Finally there is no organized playing for all of January, May, June and July. So even for a player in a D1 team, they are training much, much less of the year than a 15-year-old on a farm team in Europe. 1. https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fall-spring-rules/#ncaa-college-soccer-spring-season-rules https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fal...
- dogmatism 4mo ago
  [dead]
skywhopper 4mo ago
What’s intriguing to me is that several American colleges end up becoming magnets for European and South American soccer players. My midwestern mid-tier alma mater’s soccer team is 95% non-American.

harrall 4mo ago

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.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Qem 4mo ago
> The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on). It appears the sports industry in US skewed local preferences toward hardware-intensive sports, that sell lots of gear. Poor children can start playing soccer stuffing crumpled paper in plastic bags to create a makeshift ball, and using spaced sandals as makeshift goalposts. Minimal hardware requirements. It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera. Basketball comes closer to soccer in this regard.
- skywhopper 4mo ago
  This is way off. You only need a ball to play American football. Or a ball and bat to play baseball. Yes, the organized competitive versions have more gear involved, but so does organized soccer/football.
- toast0 4mo ago
  A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat if you're hitting a light enough ball. It you can scrounge up a tennis ball, they work pretty well for street baseball. Don't need gloves, bases can be whatever you can agree on. Of course, it you have something vaguely soccerball shaped, you can play kickball with improvised bases rather than playing soccer.
  - bilbo0s 4mo ago
    >A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat Right around the 80’s and 90’s the idea of zero-tolerance youth crime policies swept the US. Right around the same time the popularity of baseball began a decline in the US. It went from being a universally played ‘pickup culture’ sport, to a sparsely played ‘pay to play’ sport. Now I’m not gonna say the need for 8 or 9 boys to roam around a neighborhood with a giant stick looking for a place to play was the reason the ‘pickup culture’ games died. But I will say that it was probably a lot safer for those boys to just go to a basketball court and wait their turn in a ‘pickup culture’ game that did not require a giant stick or bat.

dh2022 4mo ago

+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.

drewmate 4mo ago

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.

surgical_fire 4mo ago
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.
- temp_praneshp 4mo ago
  Basketball?
- skywhopper 4mo ago
  I can’t speak to its actual popularity, but when I visit Europe and local folks hear I’m from the US, I’m surprised how often they are interested in talking about the NBA. Maybe it’s more pronounced in Eastern Europe where a lot of basketball talent has made it to the NBA over the years.

otherme123 4mo ago

> 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?"

karp773 4mo ago
If you have a choice (an offer) to be a pro player at 18, it means you had already given up on school by 12 or younger.
PearlRiver 4mo ago
Most soccer players tend to retire in their late 30s so they are better off pursuing an education after their pro athlete career. Of course the best are multi millionaires who never have to work and can live from passive income.
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  Not necessarily true, there are lots of careers where have been a professional footballer is the qualification in and of itself without having anything to do with football. E.g. sales, sufficient people find talking to an ex-footballer impressive enough to open doors that getting a job in sales is easy. And of course there's always the coaching/management path.
hunterpayne 4mo ago
Try joining a serious club between 12 to 14. Most soccer players that turn pro left school years ago. Sports and education aren't linked outside of the US.
holgerschurig 4mo ago
The most important factor however is that many EU countries don't have a US-style college system. E.g. in Germany we have a very different schooling system and a very different job education system. Even the university system is quite a bit different to the US-style. Some jobs (e.g. bookkeeper) here are apprenticeships where in the US you'd go to some community college. So there might be european soccer players around that don't have a "college" but still have learned a job from the basics. That said: a german source says that only 19.6% of the soccer stars (Bundesliga) have learned a common job.

drivebyhooting 4mo ago

This is pretty much true for all high level competition in the US. It’s extremely hard to get good at chess. It’s extremely hard to get good at math. It’s extremely hard to get good at gymnastics. It’s extremely hard to get good at Piano. Meanwhile, in China or Russia, there are dedicated schools for mass producing concert, pianist, etc.

jasonwatkinspdx 4mo ago

Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc. And often enough adults join in because they were once the kids too. So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly. One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol. Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference. Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.

Symbiote 4mo ago
Cricket is even more accessible: you need a bat (which could be a piece of wood), but you don't need space. You can compress the game to play in a 1.5m wide alleyway between two buildings. I think this is why it became so popular in India etc.
- airstrike 4mo ago
  Soccer is still more accessible. You don't even need a ball. As a kid, you'll find yourself kicking around a crushed coke can with friends and trying to score.
  - ramblerman 4mo ago
    This is a silly form of no true Scotsman, you don't create a Messi if he had been kicking a coke can around.
- 4mo ago

confidantlake 4mo ago

I think you are overlooking the more obvious answer. All the talent gets sucked up by the nfl/nba/mlb.

NotGMan 4mo ago
Why not both? And sprinkle in some cultural differences (soccer is not that popular in the USA, so it's self-reinforcing).
Detrytus 4mo ago
Well, nfl/nba are focused on big guys, 6’3 and above. In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap. And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all.
- dpark 4mo ago
  > In soccer your height/mass doesn’t matter much so the talent pools don’t overlap. This is untrue and also just silly. The talent pools for horse jockeys and NBA players don't overlap. The talent pool for soccer and football is probably 90% overlap. Smaller players are certainly more likely to be successful in soccer than football but tall players can do great in soccer and average height guys can do well in football. > And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all. Come on. Baseball doesn't demand the same athleticism as soccer but these guys are still elite athletes and there are plenty of stories of both MLB and NFL offering positions to the same players.
  - Detrytus 4mo ago
    Taller players do great in soccer, to a point. I mean, goalkeepers are the tallest, typically, about 6'4, 6'5. For field players, they usually max out around 6'3, but that's only for certain specialized positions like a striker, or central defender. Above that and you are too big and too slow, smaller players will quite literally run circles around you. I think overall average height of soccer player is below 6 feet. Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time is only 5'7 - that should tell you something.

troupo 4mo ago

> For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." This is true for most sports (and activities) in the US. Additionally, the US doesn't have the concept of unstructured play, as many (most?) kids are fully depend on the parent or the school to take them places, since most of the US is so car-dependent.

misterinfo 4mo ago

At my high school and college, the best athletes were playing Football or basketball not soccer. If some of those athletic running backs were playing soccer all their life they would've been a problem.

vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
The physical attributes needed for soccer are quite different from football or basketball. I don't think any football or basketball players would be good at soccer even if they tried.
- hunterpayne 4mo ago
  Nope, not true at all. The average NFL CB makes the best athletes in soccer or rugby look like furniture movers, even in drills designed for soccer. Same for the majority NBA PGs. There is a lot of overlap in team sports for specific types of athleticism. The average pro you see on TV could usually beat the best player in your hometown at whatever sport they played. And not just beat, but beat badly. There are NFL DTs that can do 360 dunks and run a 40 in 4.6sec (at 300lbs) which is faster than your average pro striker in soccer.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
    That makes no sense. Some NFL guys may be fast but that's not all you need in soccer. You need to be quick but you also need ball control, endurance and in general understand tactics in depth. A lot of top athletes will probably do pretty well in a lot of sports but they won't be world class in another sport. Even in motorsports Indycar or NASCAR drivers don't do well in Formula 1 despite them looking very similar.
- theklub 4mo ago
  Lebron as a goalie? Or hell half the nba...
bjohnson225 4mo ago
If those running backs played soccer they'd all be asked to slim down. Soccer requires a mix of strength, agility and endurance.

qingcharles 4mo ago

Isn't soccer a mostly women's sport in the USA? Do boys even play it at all? The USA women's team is world class, probably for this reason. In the UK boys mostly play soccer while girls traditionally played netball (basketball).

gbear605 4mo ago
Soccer is extremely widespread and played by both boys and girls at a young age (up until puberty or so), but there definitely is a gender gap after that. I'd guess that there are a lot of other sports that are almost solely played by boys, so boys tend to drift away from soccer, while there are fewer options for girls. (Though there are some - lacrosse and softball for a couple examples.)
- stephencanon 4mo ago
  Field hockey is almost exclusively a girls sport in the US, while boys have (American) football in the fall. Both draw from the potential pool of soccer players in US middle and high schools.

ignoramous 4mo ago

Despite the fairly similar cultural and financial incentives at play in Europe & South America, France and Spain (Portugal to an extent, as well) pretty much lead the footballing world in terms of elite talent. Their depth is ridiculous. For France, their sporting renaissance, if we can call it that, started way earlier in the late 1960s with what we'd call "DEI" today: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-craft-how-de-gaulle-shaped-frances-inclusive-olympic-sport-infrastructure https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-... For Spain, correctly focusing on developing in-game intelligence and skill was key in out-competing stronger & taller teams (at a time when rapidly improving football pitches were proving great for playing positional & possession-based game): A very 1970s Dutch way of playing kick-started by Johan Cruyff in 1990s at Barcelona, and converted into concrete results for the national team by Luis Aragones & Vincente del Bosque in 2000s/2010s: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that-changed-spain-and-the-one-yet-to-arrive-in-england https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that...

rauljordan2020 4mo ago

I'm from Honduras, which is also quite a poor country, and the sport (soccer) is all we do and all everyone talks about. It's a core part of our society and a core part just what one does as a human, so since we are kids we think of always kicking a ball around no matter where you are, even fashioning balls from socks tied together or rubber bands, and we all learn how to control them really well even barefoot, in difficult terrain, in rain, sun, shine, anything. It isn't a structured activity. Coming to the US I realized so many American sports need a ton of setup...lots of expensive equipment, a full squad, a special field (baseball), etc. and not just something you can do easily on the street with your friends. It isn't "lived and breathed" as it is where I'm from, and we have so many incredible players. Unfortunately, we are a poor country so the best players won't become professionals and instead pursue other careers, so our national team isn't great, but I know guys that could easily be pros in Europe if they went down that path

_DeadFred_ 4mo ago
In the US we had the same but for pickup American football. We played on the street in the neighborhood every night, and had standing games at a kind centralized empty field on Sat/Sunday where everyone know to just show up and there'd be a game, or after it rained (mud football). Only equipment was a football or a nerf football. Kids are kids :)
- 1659447091 4mo ago
  > We played on the street in the neighborhood every night Street light to utility box
- rauljordan2020 4mo ago
  I would argue it isn't the same. Not every single American male grow up playing American football. It is fragmented across the country. However, for us, almost every single human has the experience of soccer being an integral part of our lives at every stage of it, from toddler to adulthood. It's so pervasive it is part of our core vocabulary and idioms, the govt shuts down when real madrid vs barcelona play, and everyone comes together over a single cause, no matter young or old. Soccer covers every aspect of our lives over there.

dogmatism 4mo ago

> 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 wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality? Also, now with NIL etc, college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league

SamBam 4mo ago
> wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality? Of course. American varsity soccer players play ~5 times a week for four months a year, August through November. February through April is the Spring season and varsity teams are forbidden from playing too much. D1 and D2 teams can only train 8 hours per week, of which at most 4 hours per week may be coached! And then 4 months of the year are off-season and there is no structured training at all! This is a ridiculously small amount of time compared to a 15 year old Spanish kid playing in a farm team. And they're doing this part-time stuff until they're 22 or 23. A typical European professional player would have been playing full time since they were 16. > college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league ... except no where near at the level of European farm teams.
- dogmatism 4mo ago
  Ok I don't know about soccer But I know about DI Track and Wrestling. And they're essentially off like 2 weeks a year. This forbidden stuff is a fiction.

nchmy 4mo ago

Yes, this is it.

thehoff 4mo ago

What about baseball travel teams? Our kid plays travel soccer and it is expensive no doubt but our baseball parent friends pay more. I don't hear anyone complaining that baseball is pay to play. Also, from what I hear hockey is also extremely expensive. I've heard that you can't leave a sporting goods store without spending at least $1,000 on gear alone for a season. I've yet to hear anyone complain that hockey is pay to play. I think the other commenter has it right, most kids just gravitate towards American Football, Baseball, or Basketball. And in the state I live in, of probably the top five soccer teams, one is a private school, the rest are public. Edit: I don't know if other sports are like this but so many soccer parents are just extremely unrealistic/toxic. So many think they have the next superstar, questioning the coach on their child's play time, whey their kids didn't get placed on higher leveled teams, questioning why a coach is running practices certain ways.

brigandish 4mo ago
Isn't the contention that, because football is pay to play in the US, the US isn't that good compared to places that it isn't pay to play? Baseball, basketball, American football are all sports with much less international participation, and generally require pay to play elsewhere at around the same level as in the US, because of the way the sports are. There's no refutation possible from that.
- thehoff 4mo ago
  I do agree its expensive but so many point to just the cost being the big issue. How is it (on an international stage) our US women's national team is consistently good? The teams/clubs in our region charge the same for boys/girls. Related, I know the two biggest clubs by us do offer some financial aid (50% to 100% off). Then there are clubs that don't charge as much. From our kid's team its the end of the season and we have 4 families leaving to another club that is easily 8x cheaper. So those types of teams/clubs do exist. Not to mention school teams don't charge to play.

ma2kx 4mo ago

I don't think the unstructured format directly contributes to the playing strength but rather attracts more player to play in a local club. Even in the town where I life with less than 100'000 people there are 10 clubs, 168 teams and nearly 3000 (mostly semi-professional) soccer player. Of course not all of them are young anymore but extrapolate this numbers to the population of a country it becomes a huge talent pool available for the major clubs. And compared to the US there is a far more dense competition as any state has its own national league and on top are the Champions, Europe and Conference league. So every major soccer team plays in a national and a europene league at the same time and thus the players get of course much more routine. But hey, we suck at baseball and basketball.

karp773 4mo ago

It's not about structured/unstructured play at all. Basketball and hockey teams in the very same USA are world class. It's about in which sports in the country the pro clubs pay top money. It's that simple. It sets up the incentives for families, and everything else follows. 99.99% of the kids who play in the street have a lot of fun but will never make it anywhere near pro sports.

SamBam 4mo ago
Basketball is the only sport in the US that has a similar level of hundreds of hours a year of unstructured play, so it makes sense that the US is great at it. Hockey, who is the US competing against? Canada. No other country in the world takes it particularly seriously, so of course the US is one of the top two countries... (I often tell each of my two kids that they're one of my top two kids.)

amanaplanacanal 4mo ago

I think the real answer is money. If there were as many soccer fans wanting to watch games on TV as there are baseball, football, and basketball, the US would be in the top rankings.

glitchc 4mo ago

How proficient a country is at a given sport is derived from the size of the feeder pool. Baring extremely rare exceptions, top talent is strongly correlated with deep feeder pools. Sports are always cultural: Kids grow up idolizing the stars of their childhood, and those stars are drawn from the sports their parents and community expose them to. In Europe, soccer is the biggest sport, everyone grows up watching soccer on weekends and so the feeder pool (i.e. the pool of kids who are drawn to the game) is much greater than other sports. Deep feeder pool allows the system to filter relentlessly to tease out the best. In the US, and North America in general, kids grow up watching football, basketball, baseball and hockey. So that's what kids end up playing, and all of those sports have deep feeder pools. Soccer not so much.

akudha 4mo ago

Isn’t the costing money part true for other sports too, in the U.S? I remember there was a report on how much it costs for kids to play sports (more perfect union video, I think) and it isn’t cheap. It is made worse by (what else?) private equity

dataflow 4mo ago

What about women's soccer?

rurban 4mo ago

Exactly. The same reasons why US players will never be better at table tennis also. It's the capitalist school and club system, which forbids any advantage in the early years. If you have to pay, you won't train that often.

j_w 4mo ago

I don't know why any reply disagrees with this. Look at basketball in the US. The best players will tell you all they did as a kid was play basketball. You can go to anywhere somewhat populated and the outdoor courts are in use almost all the time school is not in session for pickup play. Outside of structured practice (if they are on a team), many kids are still playing pickup games or shooting casually. Soccer fields rarely get use outside of structured play. Kids that play soccer in the US just don't play as much, so their skills are (on average) much worse.