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Comment by jppope | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> It's nearly impossible for even a star athlete to succeed at more than one sport

I don't think this means as much as you're putting weight into.

I think the fact that somebody like MJ or Tim Tebow could even get a try-out in a different profession sports really speaks to top level talent being fungible. Like just imagine somebody practices being a Doctor for 20+ years and then gets an interview to be a World Cup Referee. Sure, they might not succeed at the other sport but the fact they can still do it is I think proof of sports fungibility.

It's not that top athlete's aren't well above average in a sport that they didn't dedicate their life to, it's that without that dedication they don't have a chance of being a top athlete in that sport that disincentivizes potential athletes from training in multiple sports.

I don’t think that fully aligns with my observations. The US outputs plenty of star athletes in minor sports. Swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc. It’s not all incentives like the mythical economic rational actor, especially when we’re talking about choices adolescents are making.

I think there is a more self selection process happening for athletes and sports. People with natural athletic inclinations try lots of sports young, they will do well in the ones they are most suited for, and begin taking that seriously.

No one in any country is going to be a famous athlete for swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc., so they're all competing against athletes that are also competing in that sport for the love of the sport, whereas someone playing whichever sport is called football in that country has a chance of becoming a famous athlete.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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