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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 :).

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.

The thing is you cannot just switch sports.

When we are talking about the really TOP elite of football those kids get into it at age 5. From that age on every day consists of hours of football. There are scouts looking at prepubescent kids all over the world ready to sign them.

That's the point. Since so many sports are competing for "player attention", people may commit to the "wrong" sport early on, be decent, and then top out at an age where it's too late (in terms of going pro) to switch to a sport they may have been great at.

In a hypothetical world where every kid plays only soccer, every potentially great soccer player has been practicing the sport from an early age. In a world with 10 competing sports, some potentially great soccer players might have be playing baseball or basketball from a young age up into their late teens.

Well no, an existing professional American football player has no chance of switching to being a professional soccer player. Nobody can simply switch at that level. You have to have cultivated the skills over a long period of time to ever have a chance at competing at the highest levels.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine the guys that ended up being cornerbacks, wide receivers, safeties, or even halfbacks couldn’t have become soccer professionals given the right culture, training, and desire growing up. Sure, linemen, tight ends, and fullbacks aren’t built for soccer.

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

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?

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.

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).

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