Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-isnt-the-us-better-at-soccer

by 7777777phil • 2 months ago

92 272 2 months ago

a country can only be so good at so many sports of this type. Every american playing basketball, or baseball, or american football, or ice hockey, is one not playing football. You have to understand that for many countries, the dream path, the default one, for a very athletic young person who is interested in team sports is soccer, from the age of 6 or younger. The entire structure above that branches outward based on this huge intake of talented children, with vast institutions of professional coaches, academies, and huge amounts of training and game time with other talented people, no matter where in the country they live.

Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business.

This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.

PaulHoule3• 2 months ago

I think the rest of the world is rapidly catching up whent it comes to girls.

brewdad• 2 months ago

Also, in the US until very recently, there was no path for women athletes to make sports their career after college. Soccer could be a path to a scholarship but you were going to have to get a "real" job after that even if you wanted to continue to pursue Olympic or World Cup level goals in the sport. The NWSL is changing that but salaries are still nowhere near the men's game, nor any other male dominated professional league.

hackerbeat• 2 months ago

Didn't read the post, but the problem is that in most top soccer countries, soccer is the number one sport, light-years ahead of everything else. In the US, several other sports are more popular, which drains the talent pool. Kids grow up immersed in soccer culture in places like Brazil, Argentina, Germany or Spain in a way that simply isn't as common in the US.

cortesoft2• 2 months ago

I get this argument, and it is probably partially right, but is soccer really competing for the same athletes as basketball and American football? Basketball players are mostly too tall for soccer (other than goalie), and a majority of football players are way bigger than great soccer players. Baseball and hockey might compete for the same athletes, but a huge percentage of baseball and hockey players also come from other countries.

bad_haircut72• 2 months ago

Kids who are good at sport excel at it all throughout school years, then once they hit college age the smaller ones dont make it further in American football any more - but they still spent their childhood playing it. In e.g. Uraguay its probably opposite, the naturally heavy guys cant compete at top level soccer (Im guessing) and fall out of professional sports

vasco• 2 months ago

For national teams you only need to consider outlier athletes not averages. And many of the most top athletes at sport A would do very well at sport B. If a country funnels 100% of kids into a single sport, every single genetically gifted athlete will be put through the same selection process. Imagine every single physically gifted kid going to tryouts of the same sport. That's Portugal.

cweld510• 2 months ago

It definitely is at the youth level. I don’t think any football or basketball pros could be soccer stars, but absolutely there are kids who are star point guards on their youth basketball team but top out at 5’8”, or football players who never make it past high school but could have been great at soccer.

LeifCarrotson• 2 months ago

Those genetic requirements come into play at elite levels, but you need to start young, when those differences are less obvious.

You need to look at what sports an eight-year-old is playing in the backyard, what sports his Dad is excited about on the TV.

An agile, fast, coordinated kid who's coachable and wants to train hard but is going to grow up to be 5' 8" is not going to make the NFL or the NBA, but if they've got the athleticism to play in the World Cup... well, in the US that kid will be the point guard on the local high school basketball team and also play safety and wide receiver on the football team.

In India, they'd be a cricket star.

microtonal• 2 months ago

The difference in sports culture leads to almost no talent getting wasted.

I grew up in a European (Holland) country and as boys we'd play soccer all the time, during school on the schoolyard, after school, in the evening and the vast majority of boys in my class joined the local soccer team (me included). Even though we were a local team in a small village, scouts of slightly more important teams would sometimes come to our matches.

Basically, because soccer is so ingrained in our culture, virtually all boys play soccer at some point. That combined with all the clubs that play at different levels, and the scouting network, virtually no talent is missed.

Put differently, when a new Cruyff or Robben is born, there is a high probability that he will be found.

Women's soccer is really a different story. It has only started to take off in recent years and at least as many girls seem to play hockey.

Of course, it should be said that the only sport that really matters is Korfbal/Korfball :).

mattnewton• 2 months ago

I think it is less about competing for athletes and more about competing for national attention (in the form of sports viewership that turns into money and school programs).

lostapathy3• 1 month ago

Perhaps the kids that could be soccer superstars stick with basketball until they figure out they aren't tall enough for the NBA, but are too old or just never developed enough interest in soccer to become a pro at that. But if they didn't have that NBA dream growing up, they may well have become a soccer superstar?

cogogo2• 2 months ago

I think that is a contributor to the problem but the real problem is we do not yet know how to develop talent consistently in the US. FC Barcelona is easily the world reference recruiting kids around 7-8 years old and building them mentally, physically and tactically into incredible players. Something like half or more of their current roster came through la masía at some point. And something like half the Spain world cup roster plays for Barcelona.

There are soccer academies in the US but it is still relatively new and we do not have a great development model yet. Youth academies are also fairly antithetical to how talent pipelines work for the established US sports.

harrall6• 2 months ago

I mean you could say that baseball academies in Brazil aren’t good yet either, but I wouldn’t say that it’s because they “don’t know how to.”

It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular, except they already have soccer plus even basketball is growing quicker.

In America, soccer just isn’t that popular and there are so many other sports that people currently care about more.

waltfy2• 2 months ago

Not American. Don’t live in US. The outside impression I get is that the game simply isn’t one of the kids’ default street sports.

fsckboy• 2 months ago

the US has a large relatively recent influx of Latino populations, and they play a lot of soccer, and in a number of cultures also baseball

waltfy2• 1 month ago

Interesting, I didn’t think of that. Growing up in Brazil, soccer was essentially the only sport boys played, at every opportunity.

In the absence of a ball, we’d dislodge the plastic ball from a roll on deodorant packaging and play with that, or a table football ball (which hurt a lot).

Then - in my late teens - studying in the UK football (soccer) was also predominant, played during breaks etc.

My point being that the US is along other large nations such as India, China which culturally favour other games/sports.

Contrast these nations with Uruguay for example, tiny country… has won the World Cup. I do not know this, but I’d hazard a guess that soccer is THE game in the streets of Uruguay.

musictubes5• 1 month ago

Yup. For many years in DC just about the only people that went to DC United games were Latinos. They are still the dominant supporters of professional US soccer I think.

I had a surreal experience one day after work. I lived on a cul de sac and it was common to have kids play baseball or kickball in the summer. There was one Indian family on the street and the eldest boy had convinced them to try cricket that day. Heard him yelling “Bowl it! Bowl it!” So yeah, immigrants add a lot to the US including sports.

jppope2• 2 months ago

Correct. We actually don't play "football" properly as a street sport either though... its typically a flag style football (two hand touch, etc) but the main sports are (generally separated by season during school) football, hockey/basketball, baseball.

chrsw2• 2 months ago

It's not. The first time I ever saw kids playing soccer on their own with no adult supervision was when I left the US. I haven't seen it since I've been back. I think that's the most glaring "issue" right there.

dfxm125• 1 month ago

This is part of it, but you only need a few dozen great players to put together a program. Another part is organization. Italy has kids playing calcio in the streets by default, but FIGC has been run poorly for decades. USSF tries, but similarly is a little in over their heads.

283042834092342• 2 months ago

What are you talking about? They've been world champ repeatedly.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-histo...

tekla• 2 months ago

The qualifier is literally the sub-headline and is mentioned several times in the article.

283042834092342• 2 months ago

Yet it is not in the submission. How am I to know you all assume male sporting events?

talktalkmake• 2 months ago

In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.

bananamogul• 2 months ago

Because we have 4 other sports that originated in the Americas: basketball, gridiron football, hockey, and baseball.

If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.

Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.

Or we have two other sports that are totally different.

Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.

cortesoft2• 2 months ago

Basketball players are almost a completely separate population from soccer players. The shortest basketball player would almost be too tall for soccer.

RugnirViking2• 2 months ago

"too tall for soccer" is something of a weird statement, given the large advantage height gives in the game. Even at high levels, some teams' strategy resvolves around having a couple tall guys (and many other teams keep tall guys to deal with those same strategies). It of course isn't everything, given the need for stamina, sprinting, and strength, which are hard to have all at once in a tall person. But its not uncommon for defenders and some strikers to be 6'8" or upward - average height in the premier league is 6'1" and creeping upward each year

dmurray2• 2 months ago

This is definitely an exaggeration. The median NBA player is 6'5" according to [0]. Most top teams will have a few players around that height, even excluding goalkeepers (though heavily weighted towards central defenders and centre-forwards).

Even if it's directionally correct, the point made further up in the thread is very important: basketball players aren't a different population from soccer players at age 14, when they need to pick something to be serious about if they are going to end up in the big leagues. Lots of them choose basketball, turn out not big enough, but would have been perfectly fine in soccer.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1btj60p/oc...

venzaspa3• 1 month ago

American football originated from Rugby and Baseball originated from Rounders.

analog31• 2 months ago

I remember when in grad school, there were two casual sports leagues for the grad students: Softball and soccer.

The best softball teams were the MBA and law students, who were mostly American.

But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.

haunter3• 2 months ago

I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either.

Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.

vinni2• 2 months ago

I can’t speak for other countries but in India cricket eclipses all other sports and drains talent. But soccer is gaining popularity recently but still long way to go.

PaulHoule3• 2 months ago

Field Hockey is huge in India too. (Thing is India is so big that anything that is big in India is big globally!)

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

If you think about it, India and China already have other very popular sports. Soccer is kind of somewhat of a niche there.

Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.

Tade0• 2 months ago

Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina.

Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.

bethekidyouwant• 2 months ago

What sport is popular in China?

alex00152• 2 months ago

All I know to write about here is China: school is one massive obstacle for professional sports. Lots of kids in China try out tons of different hobbies and sports, and any sport or activity you can think of likely has a number of clubs in bigger cities, enough to create a community of people with a serious interest. I'm thinking of Chinese kids I know personally who are into football, breakdancing, archery, ballet, drama, all kinds of stuff.

And then, right at a child's age where European scouts are noticing kids over there, in China parents are hit with massive, massive pressure to help their kids academically as best they can. Good middle school -> good high school -> good university -> good job. Unless your kid is far and away a natural talent easily exceeding their peers, you're going to hesitate to let them devote more time to professionally developing athletic ability. Athletic competition at the highest levels in China is intense due to the number of natural talents you get in a large population, and with every year that goes by without your kid quite making it into the professional-athlete track, the pressure gets higher to abandon that track and focus on academics.

So the athletic practice, even for a quite promising kid, gets sidelined for more study time and after-school classes. And this happens even for kids with parents who want them to have a balanced life without the insane pressure for academics the Chinese school system is known for. For those families it just takes the shape of cutting back the athletic practice instead of nurturing it to a possibly professional level.

One other factor that I can think of is just a culture of family interest. I don't know any Chinese men older than 45 who are into watching sports at all, whereas in the West (and also India, I think?) it's common for a family interest in sports to have already existed for generations. I do know Chinese men my age (31) who are into basketball and have young kids who might grow up with that interest. That's all anecdotal, I know, but my sample is big enough for it to be surprising to me in comparison to other places.

Marsymars• 1 month ago

Any insight into why China does relatively well at the Olympics?

mcmoor2• 1 month ago

What interesting is that unlike other nations in that list, Indonesians already love soccer to death, literally. But they're still very underrepresented in the world stage.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

I remember they were not that bad, some years ago. But sports is already heavily covered in the USA: basket ball, american football and so forth. Establishing a new sport is harder in such an environment.

JackFr• 2 months ago

The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer.

As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great.

Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.

tracerbulletx• 2 months ago

The is probably the most significant reason. The top athletes are pulled into other sports which have higher cultural status and financial rewards.

lukan2• 2 months ago

"Soccer is like the metric system of sports."

No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it.

Different sports.

(I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)

Mallory_Ringess• 2 months ago

I think you're looking at the comparison from the wrong angle. The parent poster meant the USA does not take up the metric system because the imperial units are seen as part of their culture while metric is a 'foreign' thing. Typically American sports like baseball, American 'football' and basketball are seen as part of American culture as well while football (which for some unexplainable reason is called 'soccer' in the USA) is seen as the foreign thing, just like metric. It is not like any of these sports is better or worse in any way, in the end they're all forms of ritualised warfare without (too much) bloodshed and they all work in this regard: the winner gets the spoils, the loser gets to leave the field with their tails drooping.

Qem3• 1 month ago

Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy

The clear logic behind soccer is low barrier of entry. A vacant lot, some friends and a makeshift ball gets any child started. Even the poor can play it with minimal inputs.

josuepeq• 2 months ago

My problem is I can’t stay interested for long.

Yes, it’s possible that it’s a “me” problem.

90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle.

If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.

borosuxks• 2 months ago

Football (or soccer for you) can be insanely high tempo and insanely slow and boring. Depends on the game.

But the low scoring is actually one of the most important things in soccer.

A goal in soccer is so much more precious than in any other sport. It can win you the game, as almost a third of games have one or less goals in the game. So the euphoria when the team scores outweigh any "boringness" that preceded it. It can only be compared to a sudden death win in hockey (another relatively low scoring game, though a not as low as soccer).

Those not into soccer don't really understand this, and many have tried to increase the number of goals scored. But it doesn't make the game better. An 8-2 score is much more boring than a 2-0 game, as the nerve is there all game.

skydhash• 1 month ago

I got into soccer late (watching it, as I was playing it all the time as kid). The best aspect is that it can be incredibly hard to score and a goal requires good team coordination and individual skills, which must be better than those of the adverse teams.

Once you get familiar with it, it becomes an anticipation game. And you on the stand usually as a better view of a play than the players. So while there’s only passing going on, you start to sense the strategy shifts. And you may even think it’s either doomed or have a high chance of success, but the opposite happens.

A goal is the reward for high amount work, not a foregone conclusion. That’s what makes a penalty so painful.

prmph3• 2 months ago

In addition to the sibling comment, I'd say that to enjoy the game, you really need to appreciate what's hard, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, and how much training goes into all that.

But I guess it is hard to do that later in life, if you did not grow up in a football (soccer) culture, maybe playing recreationally as a boy, and avidly following the game.

jrpelkonen• 2 months ago

I think it’s hard to truly appreciate any sport you haven’t played yourself. I personally cannot get excited about baseball, and it’s probably mostly because of my own lack of playing experience.

SamBam4• 2 months 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.

hawaiianbrah2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

SamBam4• 2 months 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-fal...

skywhopper3• 1 month 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.

harrall6• 2 months 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.

Qem3• 2 months 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.

brigandish3• 1 month ago

Baseball was invented in Britain.

rascul• 1 month ago

American Football is Canadian.

dh20223• 2 months 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• 2 months 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_fire3• 2 months 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.

otherme123• 2 months 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?"

PearlRiver2• 1 month 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.

hunterpayne3• 1 month 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.

karp7732• 1 month 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.

holgerschurig2• 1 month 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.

pjc502• 1 month ago

The US sports system is especially structured around colleges; while you get named city teams in American football and basketball, there doesn't seem to be anything like the European system where there are often multiple city teams, teams with "works" origins, and generally the legacy of the big early 1900s working class soccer boom. Which was organic/grassroots around self-organized clubs.

In fact, class plays a big role: soccer used to be "too working class" for British university goers, who play rugby (named after the elite school!) or more esoteric stuff like Oxbridge rowing.

drivebyhooting• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

jandrewrogers5• 2 months ago

The counterpoint to this is that, broadly speaking, Mexico is demonstrably no better at soccer than the US when it matters. A common talking point in recent years is that the US league is actually better at developing Mexican talent than the Mexican league, though that somewhat reflects different incentives.

I think a core issue is that US and Mexican teams rarely have an opportunity to compete against teams significantly better than themselves. Furthermore, structural constraints within both leagues limit the amount of talent separation that can occur between teams, so it looks a bit like being stuck in a local minima in terms of talent development.

mcmoor2• 1 month ago

I thought the concrete ground is much more important for basketball, otherwise the ball would bounce all over the place. In comparison, muddy ground for soccer is part of the fun.

WhyNotHugo• 1 month 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.

The same is true in Argentina. And in school kids play almost every recess too.

A lot of very prominent player from Argentina had this kind of humble beginning too.

WalterBright• 1 month ago

I played soccer during recess at school. I was inept at it. I was terrible at football, too. I really stunk at basketball. Berry berry bad at baseball. Sank at swimming.

puelocesar• 1 month ago

A ball? When I was a kid we rolled a bunch of socks together and played with it in the middle of the street and we defined the goal area with a pair of flip flops.

No need of a ball and infrastructure when you really want to play

ksec• 1 month ago

she was immersed in it

The other part is not only do these kids spend more time on these sports depending on culture or norm but also the players they are playing against.

The same is with Basketball in US, Table Tennis in Taiwan and Football in Europe. You are likely playing against people who are much just so much better at the sport compared to other countries with different norm. You are basically training with better people. And this pushes the quality of players even higher.

confidantlake• 2 months ago

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

NotGMan• 2 months ago

Why not both?

And sprinkle in some cultural differences (soccer is not that popular in the USA, so it's self-reinforcing).

Detrytus2• 1 month 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.

onlypassingthru2• 1 month ago

IIRC, Steve Nash wanted to play professional soccer but since there wasn't a professional pathway had to settle for playing basketball in college and later the NBA.

venzaspa3• 1 month ago

I think you're probably underestimating just how much time kids in other places spend playing football in their spare time. When I was a kid, we were out 2-3 hours every night after school playing it.

troupo3• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

vjvjvjvjghv2• 1 month 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.

bjohnson225• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.)

ignoramous• 1 month 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-...

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...

rauljordan20203• 1 month 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_• 1 month 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 :)

dogmatism2• 1 month 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

SamBam4• 1 month 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.

nchmy• 1 month ago

Yes, this is it.

thehoff2• 1 month 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.

brigandish3• 1 month 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.

ma2kx2• 1 month 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.

karp7732• 1 month 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.

SamBam4• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

What about women's soccer?

rurban• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

rdtsc2• 2 months ago

The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show.

That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.

hawaiianbrah2• 2 months ago

That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms.

I’ve never heard that, in fact there are more boys who play in America than girls.

PaulHoule3• 2 months ago

It's funny, at Cornell I think the men play soccer better than the woman unequivocally but at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but stupid game whereas the women play a much smarter game when it comes to controlling the space.

A men's and women's sport that can be played with the same facilities is an economic plus -- college soccer is a great way to have fun supporting your school. It's a very different situation than field hockey, which is almost exclusively a woman's sport in the US although it is a huge men's sport in India and many other countries.

rauljordan20203• 1 month ago

This is hilarious because we think the same about any sport that isn't soccer (football) in much of Latin America: "basketball / baseball is what girls play" is the tagline folks said growing up

rdtsc2• 1 month ago

Absolutely. It's funny how that works in a way. And then we end up with articles like "how come such and such a sport isn't popular, it's obviously such a great sport".

Some of it may be just adversarial, Americans wouldn't like soccer because well they want to feel special and different than Europeans. And likely Europeans or say Brazilians just wouldn't like American football, it just looks goofy to them.

reenorap• 2 months ago

The insane level of flopping with no dignity or shame, and the insane level of allowing this to happen without any penalties is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t watch soccer. Those in charge WANT soccer players to flop but I don’t understand why. It’s dishonorable and weak but the sport does nothing to stop it.

Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.

halJordan• 2 months ago

Gamesmanship in soccer is not more egregious than in say basketball. If you look at the nonsense ronnie coleman did in his day you wouldn't be complaining about soccer players

dfxm125• 1 month ago

Ronnie Coleman, the bodybuilder?

prmph3• 2 months ago

If all you see in soccer is fake flopping, that means you do not really appreciate nor understand the game, you do not understand what hard and what's easy, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, etc

The fake flopping happens sometimes, but overall it hardly detracts from the game. It would be like me saying false starts is why I don't watch the 100 m dash.

And I'd be wary of thinking a fall is fake when the referee and the linesmen who are actually on the field think otherwise. Note that soccer is mostly not supposed to be a physical contact game. It was much more like that up to the 1070s. In fact, the infamous and relentless fouling of Pelé in the 1966 World Cup was a major catalyst for the creation of the red and yellow card system.

thrill• 2 months ago

He asks if it's an MLS problem but doesn't dig into the poor management decisions that persist at the MLS level, and though he does touch on the lack of relegation, and he doesn't touch at all on the US Soccer Federation's consistently poor choices for USMNT head coach. We're presently stuck with a guy who praises the players getting into constant on-field fights and each manager constantly makes nepotistic selections for team slots who are under-performers yet constantly praised, or even worse this year, who seem to be chosen for their unfocused non-game-enhancing aggression. That sort of mis-focus might work if playing in leagues where that is the norm, but world-class players and teams play with technique, and the rough play BS lasts as long as the officials allow it and doesn't win in the long term, which is where you have to aim to win championships. It's arguable if we'd even be in the Cup this time if we weren't hosting, and I'll be surprised if we get out of the group stage this time.

TZubiri• 2 months ago

I think it's that the US follows a red ocean strategy. They don't compete on saturated markets, they'd rather make their own markets and be in a market of one, like NFL.

radiator3• 2 months ago

I find it good that US is not better at soccer. Soccer or football has gained too much importance in Europe and South America. We have seen it encourage unprecedented levels of gambling, insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football, fan violence inside and outside the stadiums, corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics, and more.

least• 2 months ago

The United States experiences the same sort of issues, just with different sports.

haunter3• 2 months ago

What you describe is pretty much true for every single american sport too

unprecedented levels of gambling

Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings

insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football

Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe

corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics

Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music.

fan violence inside and outside the stadiums

This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that

dh20223• 2 months ago

Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions fans have something to say about fan violence.

radiator3• 2 months ago

OK I 've never been to the US, so I believe you. Then the problems are more widespread: not only soccer, but professional sports in general are harmful in my opinion.

dh20223• 2 months ago

Everything you said (gambling, fan violence, billionaires who get money from cash strapped cities) applies to the US. If you substitute soccer with NFL, MLB, and NBA the statement stands.

ma2kx2• 1 month ago

I would say you Americans are more into gambling while in Europe fan violence is a bigger topic. Like just last week, after PSG won the Champions League title, there were cars burning in Paris:

https://apnews.com/article/psg-arsenal-paris-budapest-champi...

harrall6• 1 month ago

Lol it’s the same with the sports in America. People love gambling on sports no matter what country they live in.

gen2brain• 2 months ago

That is because you call it "soccer"?

lordnacho• 2 months ago

It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent.

Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.

Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.

Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.

In the US, you have some special factors:

- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.

- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.

- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.

On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.

Mattasher• 2 months ago

The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US.

You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.

weakened_malloc• 1 month ago

I love this - it seems so obvious but I had never thought about it that way!

pier252• 2 months ago

It's the culture.

I'm from Spain and living in Mexico. Football in these countries is almost like a religion.

jandrewrogers5• 2 months ago

Yet Mexico is no better at soccer than America, broadly speaking. There is also a general feeling that in the US is better at developing talent than Mexico at this point. Some of Mexico's best national team prospects in recent years were developed by MLS academies.

pier252• 1 month ago

You definitely need other factors but societal passion seems like the cornerstone. The US has everything except this.

Personally couldn't care any less about sports. I say this as an external observer.

prmph3• 2 months ago

How come Ghana, a third world country with a much smaller population and GDP, and probably less organizational capacity, has eliminated the US twice at the world cup? Granted, the US finally got its revenge, but still...

So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.

haunter3• 2 months ago

Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.

But would you say the same about the basketball where the US is dominating both the men and woment tournaments?

Gualdrapo• 2 months ago

I think in that episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" they put it much more simply - Here in South America (and Europe) soccer "is a religion".

jppope2• 2 months ago

The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.

bitmasher92• 2 months ago

I don’t think this is fully correct. Athletic skill is not universal across sports. A athlete that can be trained to be a star football player may not be able to be trained to be a star baseball player.

dlcarrier3• 2 months ago

Even though chances of succeeding in any are small, a potential athlete has far more to gain by being successful at football/basketball/baseball than at soccer. It's nearly impossible for even a star athlete to succeed at more than one sport, (see also, Michael Jordan) so anyone who wants to be a famous athlete has no incentive to train for anything other than the top three sports.

lostapathy3• 1 month ago

This is probably less true than you'd think. Freak athletes are great athletes no matter the sport.

There's kind of a soft cap on NFL player height at about 6'5" or 6'6" - hardly anybody is taller than that. But the NBA is majority guys 6'6" or taller. That split isn't because all those kids got sorted into the right sport when they were kids. It's because if you're enough of an athlete to go pro and tall enough to make a living off basketball, that's a lot easier life with a longer career than playing football.

musictubes5• 1 month ago

There are many multi sport athletes in the high school ranks and elite athletes in college are drafted in multiple professional leagues. You can see known lists here including baseball:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multi-sport_athletes

The list for college and high school would be huge. There is such a thing as athletic skill, I’ve heard it called a kinesthetic gift. People with particularly good builds, strengths, speed, agility, etc. can train those attributes across several different disciplines. As you get higher and more elite you will eventually have to specialize. “Jocks” in high school frequently played multiple sports and many lettered in multiple as well.

skillina• 1 month ago

Kids don't pick a sport based on the one they have the most potential in. Some parents might, but kids would pick a sport based on the one they enjoy, which will be influenced by social pressures. The question isn't "can they go pro in the second sport," the question is "can they play the second sport well enough to play with / impress their friends."

dfxm125• 1 month ago

It's slightly more than that. These sports (and let's include hockey, since it's played widely intentionally too) are all organized the same way, meaning the players are largely trained the same way leading up to college and also in the pros. There's a clear pipeline to the basketball and hockey national teams. The best league is the one closest to home. The uniform pipeline and playing close to home makes training for, coaching and playing with the national team that much easier, which makes the team that much better.

American men gotta find their own way to become a world class soccer player. There's no pipeline like there is for the big 4. It's harder for teammates to gel when some went through the ranks in Germany, some in England, some in Italy and have only a few weeks with a new coach to buy into the system.

America's biggest rivals also aren't very good. So while the best European and South American teams constantly have to play each other and fight for survival, the US has to play middling teams like Mexico and Canada and tiny Central American and island nations.

an0malous• 1 month ago

The root cause is that no one watches soccer so there’s no money in it. It’s not like there’s a limit of 3 sports we could send athletes to, but since no one watches soccer here there’s no money for fields, equipment, training, coaching, athletic science, etc.

osullivj• 1 month ago

This comment is wild :) In Europe we send our best athletes into athletics, not sport. Athletics is track and field, which reduces to speed, strength and endurance. Sport - football, cricket, tennis - is about technical mastery first, and only secondarily the speed strength and endurance to support it. Lionel Messi and Sachin Tendulkar would both have been deselected by any athletic selection procedure. The emphasis on athleticism over technical mastery is what makes American sport boring.

the_sleaze_• 1 month ago

Messi was in a full time Futbol Academy playing futbol 6 hours every single day when his physical attributes diverged away from his peers.

He also runs a 4.6-second 40 meter dash, well fast enough for the NFL combine.

michtzik• 2 months ago

The article at one point says "No two members of the 26-man roster play on the same club team" about the USMNT.

However, it seems that these two players both play for PSV Eindhoven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi And also these two players both play for Borussia Mönchengladbach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna

Is the article wrong? This is the only claim I bothered to check. Should I assume the rest is wrong, too?

jotaroDeon• 2 months ago

After decades of hearing the same valid reasons I've recently begun to think that soccer just pales against alternatives.

plantain• 2 months ago

Why do I need to age verify to read this?

avazhi• 2 months ago

Because Americans don't really like the sport, it isn't popular in America, and thus nobody gets their kids to play it, resulting in Americans not really liking the sport, ad infinitum.

leflambeur• 2 months ago

This has been mentioned, if using different words, elsewhere in this thread but soccer is much more accessible and casual in Latin America and Western Europe. Children often live in cities/towns where they have high mobility and agency to move around and so can get together without adult management and play and develop more freely. It's not like the U.S. where it's very processed (soccer camp, parents need to drive their kids to a place that's basically professionally organized), et cetera.

The closest thing to that in the U.S. is kids playing basketball in Brooklyn or L.A.

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

Having grown up in Norway, where soccer has always been very popular, accessibility is a factor - I'd agree with that.

The majority of soccer we played as kids wasn't even on a pitch. If you had a wall, a football, and two objects (usually jackets) to mark the goal - you could play - and that's exactly what we did.

But yeah, small neighborhood pitches were usually easy to find.

lvl155• 2 months ago

This is like asking why isn’t the US better at Cricket.

onecommentman• 2 months ago

I’ll throw in my pet theory. American football is rooted in infantry maneuvers Civil War through WWII. Soccer is closer to cavalry, a Second Millennium European experience.

Cavalry was never that important in the military experiences of Americans since its founding a mere 250 years ago, whereas lots of folks served in the infantry — Civil War through WWII. The US, moreover, is essentially a 20th Century country; infantry, tanks, air forces, etc. is 20th Century warfare; and American football echoes those 20th Century technologies.

The romantic ideal and practical effectiveness of cavalry over many centuries, ending in the 20th Century/WWI, made it much more deeply ingrained in the European (Old World) psyche. Soccer is cavalry, thus Europe and past colonies gravitated towards it.

cuttothechase3• 2 months ago

Answer is simple.

Why isn't U.S. better at Field hockey, Badminton, Cricket, Ping pong etc.?

Ideally a capitalistic system is supposed to produce the best or close to the best in each category to stay competitive then what gives?

Capitalism produces the "best" in categories where there is a high demand for a product. In the U.S., the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. This is closely entwined with "culture".

This is why the U.S. leads in sports that are tailored for television and massive stadium revenue. Sports that are more nuanced, low-scoring, or lack a domestic TV or the US cultural zeigeist simply cannot compete for the attention span of the American consumer, and by extension, the capital that follows that attention.

chrsw2• 2 months ago

Is modern baseball "high-production-value entertainment"?

For basketball and American football, those sports weren't exactly blockbusters either. The rules and strategies of those games have been carefully tailored over the years to cater to action and scoring, something that was never going happen to the rules (or laws) of soccer.

cuttothechase3• 1 month ago

Agree. "Culture" provides the nurturing "gap fill" while the capital is not exactly flowing and rules are evolving over time. Culture keeps the lights on in lean years and builds camaraderie when the sports is thriving.

Cannot keep count on how many times I have heard of "Babe Ruth" (1895 - 1948) mentioned in a movie/tv show entertainment context, where a grandpa or an elderly figure is fondly reminiscing things to their gen X grandkids!

troupo3• 2 months ago

the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment.

What part of American football or baseball is high-scoring or high-production-value or entertaining?

cuttothechase3• 1 month ago

It's hard to keep track of how many times American football or Baseball is used as a back drop of some TV shows or a hollywood blockbuster. How many US pop culture figures have performed at half time shows. How many U.S. heads of states have mentioned about their favorite teams and stadiums etc.,

goatherders• 2 months ago

The US isnt better at soccer because our best potential soccer players are playing defensive back or point guard.

It's that simple.

sashavegas• 2 months ago

Several Factors: 1.Socker does not have pause of the game as a result no add, mean not commercial $$$. Several years ago research show that none of EU socker team are profitable. 2. Boring game. Watching 90 min for maybe 1-0 score

thenthenthen3• 1 month ago

Huh half time?

bluedevil2k• 1 month ago

If LeBron James grew up in England, he’d be the greatest soccer goalkeeper in history.

notepad0x90• 1 month ago

why isn't russia, china, india?

Sports are artifacts of culture. Although the US does remarkably well in soccer despite soccer not being a mainstay of american culture. The question should be, how come the US does so well in soccer, despite it still being a niche sport (even then mostly for older generations).

Soccer is much more popular with gen-alpha and to an extent gen-z (thank youtube).

A lot of the top national teams have players that play in the premier league or some other european league. The American national team (last i recall, haven't kept up) typically only play in the MLS where even then the foreign players treat it as a last stop before retirement when they do have premier league experience.

iron sharpens iron, competition is what it's all about, year round. I wonder why the premier league didn't expand to the US, Canada and beyond? it has global popularity but with not logistical or technical inhibitions, it still is a europe only (keep in mind, europe is still a bunch of countries, so international) club. There aren't enough matches to make a 1-2 6-8 hour international flights a week that big of a deal (assuming a day of recovery afterwards), and/or matches can be scheduled so that they move to one side of the atlantic after a few weeks and back after a few more instead of lots of back and forth.

I would say the NFL and the NBA dominate US culture, but today, the MLS and NHL are about the same level with younger generations as soccer -- if you include all of soccer as one thing instead of just the MLS.

sumanep2• 1 month ago

Because there´s not anything called soccer

dfxm125• 1 month ago

Athletic American men can probably make more money playing another sport. You get perks like (mostly) free college. Paths to the pros are less uniform than the college -> pro pipeline, so even when the US has a generation of 11+ world class players, because they've been trained differently and play much further away from home, they can't come together with just a few weeks of training as easily as, say, a basketball team. Plus, the local competition isn't very good. It's just other middling teams and tiny countries.

Conversely, the NWSL is likely the most lucrative league for women besides the WNBA. In both cases, it's a legit pipeline from college to the pros. Women's hockey is similar. So you have a group of players who know each other, have been playing together for a while and were roughly trained the same way. Also, the second best women's soccer team happens to be in their "division".

They can come together as a team better than American men who all went through different training programs from youth.

foobarian• 1 month ago

My related question to this was why isn't China or India better at soccer? Given the population sizes and some reasonable talented soccer player probability you would think they would be outsized. Then you have the tiny East European countries that get medals. It's fascinating

thenthenthen3• 1 month ago

It’s not so popular in China. Basketball is somehow.

athenot• 1 month ago

Money.

Typical amount of commercials time per game:

    NFL                          60-65 min
    NBA                          40-50 min
    MLB                          40-50 min
    NHL                          25-35 min
    MLS/Premier League/World Cup 10-20 min

boringg• 1 month ago

I was going to go with money -- the amount of money to put kids through soccer in a competitive program in USA/CANADA is way more than the competitive programs in europe. That immediately drops down the amount of talent that can make it through the system + anyone who is particularly good and has any connections to europe goes there to level up faster by playing more competitive players.

venzaspa3• 1 month ago

I watched a game of American football once and was blown away by how many adverts there were. It's such a slow game too - so much stopping between tackles for deliberation (seemingly). Don't get it personally.

mikeweiss• 1 month ago

Because it's not a popular professional sport here like it is everywhere else.

tj-teej• 1 month ago

The most interesting point here is to look at Women's Soccer.

Soccer has always included lots of psuedo-nationalist reasons why different countries are better (or why the dive, why they play conservative defense, etc).

But when you look at the success of the US Women's team it's very clear that the main thing is investment in building talent. The rest of the world does it for mens soccer (football) because that's what they do. When Title 9 went into effect America put a huge amount of money (relative to other countries) into womens soccer and the US Womens team has been one of the best in the world every since.

outside1234• 1 month ago

At the most fundamental level, men’s soccer doesn’t get the best athletes. Those go to football, basketball, and baseball.

In women’s soccer they do get the best atheletes. We’ve won half of the world cups and Olympics.

exabrial• 1 month ago

Because of absurd bike-shedding by soccer purists.

Literally: just have a clock the counts down. That alone would reduce confusion but casual consumers who don’t understand the rules.

This isn’t hard.

yanhangyhy• 1 month ago

we have a idiom/joke to describe this: "美中不足" ( which origins means a flaw within beauty). but 美 also means America 中 also means China and 不 = no/not 足=foot/soccer..so Neither country is very good at football (soccer). of course china sucks more on this

manyatoms• 1 month ago

It really just comes down to TV viewership. More people watch other sports so the kids want to play those instead

uhfraid2• 1 month ago

some good points such as lack of promotion/relegation but ultimately misses the root cause

Requirements to forming a division 1 league, as determined by the ‘US Soccer Professional League Standards’:

- minimum 12 teams (14 by year 3)

- each team’s principal owner has individual net worth of $40M

- 75% of teams located within major metro markets (at least 1M people)

- 15,000 seat stadium (and enclosed)

- teams located in each of the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones

https://www.ussoccer.com/organization-members-directory/pro-...

uhfraid2• 1 month ago

As for how these requirements were determined… no clue. Never received an answer. Jury’s still out on that…

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-soccer-must-face...

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-120/274688/2023...

timeonecom• 1 month ago

It’s American TV. The free to watch stations can’t show a halftime of 45 minutes without ad breaks. They couldn’t do this when TV was the only big entertainment in the last century and now TV matters less, so that window of time is gone.

emadda• 1 month ago

I think this comes down to higher competition and practice in Europe.

A football is the default “toy” given to young lads, and you can play anywhere with anyone.

So much so there are custom “no ball games” signs in many neighbourhoods due to noise averse residents getting annoyed.

There are also many supporting elders who try to improve and guide skill development.

jiwidi• 1 month ago

US is the world best at american football :fireworks:

annagio_• 1 month ago

Because USA has different national sports and it never gave much attention in football like Argentina or even Germany. Still USA has amazing Basketball, with its NBA.

penguin_booze• 1 month ago

It's called Football. Naming something right (like the rest of the world) is first step to getting good at it.

stgo• 1 month ago

I'm sorry to say I'm glad the US are not better at soccer. Given they already have some of the finest pop artists in movies and songs, it seems to me it's a fair balance

j_m_b• 1 month ago

I'm late to the game but this question has been bouncing around in my head and I wanted to give my opinion as a sports fan. I also coach my son's soccer team so to be clear, I have nothing against soccer.

The real question is: Why isn't soccer more popular in the US?

Soccer is a very wide game. It's easy to understand and easy to start playing. Don't touch the ball with your hands and kick the ball into the goal. It's easy enough that six year olds with coed teams can start playing and have fun. It explains the huge youth participation in the US.

Soccer, however, lacks depth. Games likes baseball and football have deep strategy and specialization that soccer/basketball/hockey just can't match. It's checkers vs chess. You can develop widely different skill sets in these games.

Basketball is soccer/hockey on speed. The games are a progression of incremental advantage. Each goal scored is another adrenaline shot for the fans. It's a long chain of dopamine hits. It allows for momentum shifts.

It's no wonder then that the majority of athletic talent in the US is funneled into one of three sports in the US: football , baseball and basketball.

The big conundrum is: Why is hockey so much more popular than soccer in America? I think it's because it's a condensed arena, faster game play and has lots of aggressive plays. Whatever the answer may be, I think it will prove key in answering why soccer just hasn't caught on professionally in the US.

I don't hate soccer. I'm definitely going to be watching some world cup games. If I had a magic wand, I would implement the promotion/relegation system for every major league sport in the US. Let the owners take a haircut if they have bad teams! I think it's an excellent system which really make the owners have some skin in the game.

I just don't think soccer is compelling enough of a game to draw eyeballs away from the big three.

nxy• 1 month ago

Because the US overall aren’t as passionate, aka don’t care as much.

Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

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