OT: If soccer was the #1 sport in USA

[Stavrogin]

Don't think it would make much difference. Most of the greatest players of all time are under six foot. USA doesn't have the mentality/culture to be successful at football. They could perhaps produce world class players but would be beaten by more intelligent, cohesive teams.

[ciueli]

It will never happen. We have better sports than soccer here, that's why it's not that popular:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/soccer-corrupt-hyper-regulated-low-scoring-boring/#slide-1

Let them have it, ours are better!! That article I'm assuming was written by the most petty 10 year old on the planet.

What he says is the truth though. A sport that goes out of its way to prevent scoring championed by fans who think frequent nil-nil draws or games decided by penalty kicks are somehow a virtue.

[dukes_wild]

I'm Canadian, but yeah USA would probably be #1.

[Saint Lazarus]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but aren't the US Women's team like historically dominant in the world cup and 3x champions? A lot of this is attributed to the fact that soccer is like the #1 sport for women/girls in the US while Basketball/baseball/football is more popular for men. If American men focused on soccer, why couldn't they dominate?

[monopoman]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but aren't the US Women's team like historically dominant in the world cup and 3x champions? A lot of this is attributed to the fact that soccer is like the #1 sport for women/girls in the US while Basketball/baseball/football is more popular for men. If American men focused on soccer, why couldn't they dominate?

Yep, it's pretty obvious why we produce the best athletes for sports that we care about. America has the tools to dominate in any sport period, we just need it to be a focus of the country. If we started caring about Cricket then I guarantee eventually we would be the best at it.

[RGM_SU]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but aren't the US Women's team like historically dominant in the world cup and 3x champions? A lot of this is attributed to the fact that soccer is like the #1 sport for women/girls in the US while Basketball/baseball/football is more popular for men. If American men focused on soccer, why couldn't they dominate?

Women's football is like an amateur sport where you have gigantic gaps, not only internationally but also nationally. Moreover, many nations with a strong men's football tradition hardly care about women's football. Germany for example has won 8 out of 12 women's European Championships (including 5 straight between 1997 and 2013), whereas they've won 3 out of 17 men's tournaments. The third and fourth best women's teams at the World Cups are also Norway and Sweden who really have not done anything of worth in men's tournaments. It's really a completely different and incomparable situation.

[Saint Lazarus]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but aren't the US Women's team like historically dominant in the world cup and 3x champions? A lot of this is attributed to the fact that soccer is like the #1 sport for women/girls in the US while Basketball/baseball/football is more popular for men. If American men focused on soccer, why couldn't they dominate?

Women's football is like an amateur sport where you have gigantic gaps, not only internationally but also nationally. Moreover, many nations with a strong men's football tradition hardly care about women's football. Germany for example has won 8 out of 12 women's European Championships (including 5 straight between 1997 and 2013), whereas they've won 3 out of 17 men's tournaments. The third and fourth best women's teams at the World Cups are also Norway and Sweden who really have not done anything of worth in men's tournaments. It's really a completely different and incomparable situation.

Maybe I'm being off topic, but the only reason why I brought this up was because there was a poster in here making an argument that North America literally couldn't dominate soccer because of genetic differences. This would seem to not be the case unless American women have the "soccer gene," whereas American men don't?

It's much more likely that American women have always been brought up to play soccer in high school, while men haven't, leading to the discrepancy in their performance. This would show that it's really a culture/infrastructure thing, and if the US really put their mind to it and created soccer academies and the such, they'd no doubt be at the top of the sport.

[Impuniti]

It will never happen. We have better sports than soccer here, that's why it's not that popular:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/soccer-corrupt-hyper-regulated-low-scoring-boring/#slide-1

Let them have it, ours are better!! That article I'm assuming was written by the most petty 10 year old on the planet.

What he says is the truth though. A sport that goes out of its way to prevent scoring championed by fans who think frequent nil-nil draws or games decided by penalty kicks are somehow a virtue.

No it isn't. He has a completely idiotic take and calls the far most popular sport in the planet as not that important since Americans can take care of the better sports.. He sounds like a loser that probably blows a fuse when a random CL games in the middle of the week gets more viewers than the Superbowl.

[Riko]

I think the US would have a very ugly but effective brand of footie if it were the number 1 sport in the US. Guys who are somehow 6'4 230lbs and ridiculously fast and hard to knock off their line when they have the ball, a lot of long ball with guys trying to use speed to beat the backline. Probably 20 offsides per match for the US lol. You'd have couple of players who are technically sound while the midfield is littered with large athletes who are just big, fast and can cover a lot of ground and win headers.

6'4 and above players are useless in football, their center of gravity is too high and they can't control the ball, they can't contain the first step of a 5'8 player and they get tired more easily (too much muscolar mass to carry around).
Usually the only usefull 6'3-6'4 players are central defender but the whole team need to cover their lacks with tattics otherwise they wuold be exposed...

I think the US has a different class of athletes as seen by their dominance in the Olympics, if it were the number 1 sport in the country I think they'd have one of the taller teams in the world (average height for Germany is 6'2) with some unique players.

De Gea, Pogba, Lukaku, Zlatan are all between 6'3 and 6'5, the combined population of their 4 countries is 1/3 of what the US population is. Just numbers alone and the US would produce some taller players IF the country cared about the sport like the rest of the world and had the academies but it doesn't, this is all hypothetical since the NBA & NFl get all the development money in the US and soccer is viewed as a rich persons sport there.

A few thing:
1) German NT is 6'1 and if we exclude the GK they are just barely under 6'0
2) De gea is a Gk so has little meaning listed him, lukaku&pogba are 6'2, zlatan is the only one around 6'4 but he is one of the few exception in football history of high-technical players (and he too played no defense in his career so his team must covered him...).
3) US has great athletes but, I repeat 6'4 players are generally are a problem: 6'2 is the limit for football player. Obviously you can have a couple of 6'4 players on the pitch but the rest of the team must work hard to cover their weakness.

[The411]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but aren't the US Women's team like historically dominant in the world cup and 3x champions? A lot of this is attributed to the fact that soccer is like the #1 sport for women/girls in the US while Basketball/baseball/football is more popular for men. If American men focused on soccer, why couldn't they dominate?

Women's football is like an amateur sport where you have gigantic gaps, not only internationally but also nationally. Moreover, many nations with a strong men's football tradition hardly care about women's football. Germany for example has won 8 out of 12 women's European Championships (including 5 straight between 1997 and 2013), whereas they've won 3 out of 17 men's tournaments. The third and fourth best women's teams at the World Cups are also Norway and Sweden who really have not done anything of worth in men's tournaments. It's really a completely different and incomparable situation.

Maybe I'm being off topic, but the only reason why I brought this up was because there was a poster in here making an argument that North America literally couldn't dominate soccer because of genetic differences. This would seem to not be the case unless American women have the "soccer gene," whereas American men don't?

It's much more likely that American women have always been brought up to play soccer in high school, while men haven't, leading to the discrepancy in their performance. This would show that it's really a culture/infrastructure thing, and if the US really put their mind to it and created soccer academies and the such, they'd no doubt be at the top of the sport.

Genetics are a bunch of garbage. Otherwise how do you explain someone like Radja Nainggolan who is Indonesian by heritage and a Belgian by birth.

His skills were honed in Belgium.

Best analogy is Michael Jordan trying to play baseball. Amazing athlete but his skills dodn’t translate. That’s why simply having the best athletes doesn’t work.

The problem is 99% of the coaches in the US do not know what they are doing and there is no unified philosophy on type of type formations and skill development.

The other issue is that NCAA soccer is virtually useless. It’s far too late in the development cycle.

If you are a top talent you are likely playing against professionals at 16/17.

The other issue is the closed system in MLS. What the MLS would like people to believe is that 28-36 franchise spread out over the entire US will be able to fish out the top talent and develop it, which is a complete pile of crap.

If you don’t believe me look how arbitrary the MLB draft is vis a vis the NBA and NFL drafts. NFL has college football to filter out talent. NBA has had college basketball.

[BackseatBoss]

I think the main problem of saying “US would be number 1 if we cared” is that Americans simply cannot comprehend how big football is in the rest of the world. Like literally, no clue. US dominates in basketball, but it doesn’t have even a quarter of the popularity football does. American football is basically non-existant outside of the states. If we’re talking about amazing American football athletes that would play football instead, we can talk about all the Australians choosing football instead of Australian rules football, which also has athletic freaks that are built like tanks. Baseball basically has very little international competition, and even there it’s mostly Cuba dominating the sport with US not really being a clear cut number 1.

Football is more than just “we have the best athletes and great sports infrastructure, therefore we would dominate if we wanted to”. Athletic freaks don’t matter much. If you think that Americans would be spending as much as some European clubs to get stars, you’re a bit crazy. Neymar is rumored constantly to have a transfer price alone that is more than 200 million euros. Not his salary, the transfer price the team would pay to be able to pay his contract as an additional cost. Ronaldo is also starting to be rumored for going for more than that. You think only Americans are rich? Are you prepared to have bidding wars with Russian oligarchs, who have infinite money, sheikhs from Middle East, Chinese investors and everyone else? US is rich, has a bunch of rich people, but most people in the rest of the world are also obsessed about football.

And finally, just because the national league would be good, wouldn’t mean that everyone would want to play there. US would not be a member of the champions league, which is basically the tournament for top players to play in. The top teams in the world are still in Europe and it wouldn’t change if Americans got obsessed about it as well. People forget that a lot of athletes don’t just care about money, they want to play against top competition to prove their worth. That place is still getting a spot in a team like Real, Barca, PSG, Bayern or another 10+ teams I could easily name. It’s the same as you think LeBron would leave for Europe if let’s say CSKA Moscow offered him 50 million euro a year contract tax free? He might be interested, but in the end he would heavily decrease the level of competition. There’s a reason why MLS is only signing mostly washed up football stars from Europe. They have proved everything they could, they are not as great as they once were and just go to quietly finish their careers with getting a last nice paycheck.

I understand that for Americans it’s “be number one or it’s nothing”. And guess what, that would also affect on how good you’d be at football. Football has a much more level pitch with regards of competition. Pinpointing the best team in the world is nearly impossible, especially for more than like a couple of years time. US would be great if this was their main focus, but they wouldn’t be the top team in the world, at least definitely not for more than a year or two every couple of decades or so. Would Americans be ok with that, especially when everything is “gold or bust”?

[Brt19]

England breathes football, clubs are rich, facilities are there, gene pool is smaller compared to US but you could say it's similar and they're nowhere near #1

England is a special case. Their premier league is a cash machine filled with foreign talent who play key roles in their top level teams. In World Cup when all English national players are being counted on, they cannot pull it off. Their young talent simply lacks the opportunity to grow in their top flight games.

English players almost never plays out of the country. City and Chelsea don't use English players (even Chelsea had Lampard, Terry and Cole and City have Walker) but rest of the top 6 give plenty of chances. Then you have teams like Burnley, Southampton, Everton to a degree. They are just not that good.

[Pachinko_]

So what does a kid have to do to join a serious soccer club in the US and get some proper training and competition?
Pay? Forget it, you have no hope. It needs to be free, and the good ones need to have expenses covered and start getting paid early.

And forget draft, non paid students, one and done, cap, parity and all that jazz, or you'll lose all your players to Europe. Its a cruel world in soccer

[BloodNinja]

To be #1 USA would have to totally revamp the way they think and align their soccer setup with the rest of the world. No salary cap, no draft, no NCAA etc. Aside from that their league would have to be good enough to attract the best players in the world so the money would have to flow.

If you just pumped more resources into the game you wouldn't achieve too much.

[ReKon]

This is really complicated.

Athleticism while important isn't the end all be all in soccer. Take the best American soccer players of the last years for example. Bradley, Clint Dempsey, Pulisic currently are not the most athletic guys in the world. Hell the best player in the world right now, Messi is by no means an athletic freak. It's a different skillset you need in soccer. Also the argument that US is the most multicultural doesn't really apply. Take the France national team for example with their large African population, Germany has a large Turkish population etc.

From the initial hypothesis though US wouldn't be number 1 but they would be in the top 5. If soccer was the #1 sport the US football association would realise that:
1) Infastructure would be better than the current level. And I am talking from the standpoint of organised leagues from a youth level as it happens in Europe.
2) For once teams would need to realise that the draft and salary cap system is not how everything should work. And even if it did kids in Europe go pro when they are 17 or 18 years old and they get to train with some of the best players and coaches in the world from a young age. Pulisic for example moved to Germany when he was 16 years old. Players should be drafted right out of highschool instead of playing college football till they are 20 years old.
3) The most important ingredient probably. All of the before mentioned soccer powerhouses have their own "school" of football players. Spain for example is known for their patient possession game. Germany is disciplined. US would have developed a certain identity I assume if soccer was the most popular sport.

With that being said what the US needs is some good youth coaches and programs to develop their talent. I am not talking from an athletic standpoint I am talking purely from a tactical standpoint.

[sardinian]

Among the best (3-5), after Brazil and Argentina

[Spens1]

Certainly in that top 5-10, i'm thinking probably like in the same conversation as a Brazil, Germany, Spain etc of just being at the top pretty consistently.

Tactics is where it may get interesting, how would the U.S. play, would they rely on sheer athleticism and just go for exploting the flanks and using their natural pace and physicality or go for technique.

[Spens1]

I am sure USA, Canada or Russia will never produce players caliebers of today's Ronaldo & Messi. Not even players close to their level.

Maybe not Ronaldo level but Pulisic could go onto become a top 5-10 player in the world easily (probably once he makes his inevitable move to Bayern, as is Bundesliga tradition).

[Higgs Boston]

It's not so easy, you need to have skilled athletes with low centre of gravity, USA has great athletes but a lot of them are too tall for soccer, especially for offensive players.
In handball USA would dominate just like in basketball tho.

[amyklai]

I am sure USA, Canada or Russia will never produce players caliebers of today's Ronaldo & Messi. Not even players close to their level.

Maybe not Ronaldo level but Pulisic could go onto become a top 5-10 player in the world easily (probably once he makes his inevitable move to Bayern, as is Bundesliga tradition).

LOL. Christian Pulisic is good, but "top 5-10 player easily" is ridiculous.

Yes, he might become top 5-10 some day.

But that's a very, very high bar to cross, and he's still pretty far away from there. There are always quite a few young players who look promising, but only very few of those ever get to become top 5 or top 10 players. A lot of things have to work out perfectly for that to be the case, having the right coaches, playing at the right club, getting in the right situations, staying injury free and motivated etc. etc.

And for most of those talents, it never happens, they just stay good players.

There have been many players who at some point early in their careers have done much greater things than Pulisic has but never became "top 5-10". Just to name a few players from Pulisic's own club: Rosicky, Sahin, Goetze, Kagawa, Lewandowski, Reus, Dembele - they all looked very compelling early in their careers, many of them have achieved things early in their careers that Pulisic still only dreams of, some of them had pretty good careers yet still, none of them reached "top 5-10" status (Dembele still might get there some day, but the last year was at least a bit sobering).

And this kind of attitude is the problem with the whole thread. Everybody who claims "US would be #1 easily" needs to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

The "gene pool" argument is rather nonsensical, as there are plenty of "soccer countries" with plenty of genetic diversity, migration is happening in a lot of places, the US is not really unique in this respect. There are a lot of places where soccer is the #1 sport, a lot of those places have decent to very good scouting networks, training facilities, youth academies, good leagues and very good clubs.

Even countries like Brazil don't dominate all the time and can lose a game badly and can be sent home 7:1 on a bad day. Even countries like Italy or the Netherlands don't even make it to the World cup. Reigning world champions don't make it out of the group stage. Even a goat candidate like Messi, on an Argentinian team with a lot of other top players hasn't won a world cup yet.

So, basically, the level of global competition is very high, a lot can happen in a single game and being at the top (or even getting into the semi final) is not guaranteed for anyone. This level of competition is the major difference compared to US-centric sports like basketball, baseball and American Football, which are an afterthought in most other countries.

And while there's nothing that suggests that US could not catch up to other countries and become one of the favorites once they underwent the transformation to a top soccer country, there's also nothing that suggests the US would completely dominate the RotW in a way never seen before.

"#1 easily" doesn't happen for anyone in soccer. And it wouldn't be different for the US.