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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.

Mexico performs as you'll expect a third world country that loves football to perform, and the US performs as well as you would expect a first world country that is ambivalent to football to perform.

I think the real mystery is, how come Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay play so much better than what you would expect from relatively poor countries?

My guess is that their leagues are fairly developed industries, like you would expect in the first world.

We play football every time in Argentina, not to say in Brazil

Football in Brazil has history, legacy, and mind share. I can name several professional teams from Brazil - Flamenco, Corinthians, Santos, etc. I also know of River Plate, Rosario and Boca Juniors from Argentina. This points to the fact that Brazilian and Argentine teams are older than the Mexican teams.

I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s. The oldest Brazilian and Argentina clubs date back to the 1900s.

> I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s.

Teams like Atlante and América were founded in 1916.

> My guess is that their leagues are fairly developed industries, like you would expect in the first world.

Pretty much, like in Europe, if you have any interest/talent in football, you enroll in your local club as a kid and go on from there, in Argentina you have a multitude of leagues until you reach Primera Division, so you have from 5 to 6 levels of competition in between organized directly by the Argentine Football Association, founded in 1891, also ran the first tournament in that same year, which makes it the oldest associated football league other than the British FA cup (1871).

Below that you have the regional/provincial leagues, the least populated province, Tierra del Fuego, has 2; Buenos Aires province has 70+ by itself.

Holy hell. Yea that sounds about right!

The Mexican Primera favors a unique type of athlete…players who can regularly play at 10,000 feet (3000m) because many matches are played in and around Mexico City. And other clubs are also above 5000 feet.

Add in daytime heat, night cold, humidity and smog and you get a very different practical reality that shapes the pace and tactics of the Primeria and soccer culture in general. In turn that shapes who succeeds as a soccer playing athlete.

This is an interesting theory. But do Mexican soccer players do much better at home games?

Not clear what you are asking, but at the international level Azteca is notoriously advantageous…of course top European sides never visit so there’s no general empirical data.

And you won’t get much more from the world cup because the only ceded European side favored to play at Azteca is England in the round of 8.

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.

Soccer is still more accessible. You don't even need a ball. As a kid, you'll find yourself kicking around a crushed coke can with friends and trying to score.

This is a silly form of no true Scotsman, you don't create a Messi if he had been kicking a coke can around.

there is also a ton of grass-roots football in India, with kids kicking a ball around wherever there is a space for it. that doesn't translate to having good national teams simply because there is not much funding to develop the game, unlike with cricket.

Cricket also does not require a lot of running and because the defense controls the ball, it fills a lot of time at a slow pace.

Like Baseball, a Sunday afternoon game has a low risk of an injury that prevents work on Monday.

My mate broke someone's arm bowling at him. Cricket always has an element of danger, for both the fielders and the batters.

Getting hit in the face/neck by a cricket ball moving at 150mph can cause serious injuries, even death.

For example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Hughes

Minor nit: Fastest ever recorded ball bowled was 100 mph. I believe you were thinking 150 kmph.

Also, if we're talking about street/amateur cricket, or even higher-level cricket a couple of levels removed from international, you are rarely going to have rockets hurled at you. Most will be 120 kmph tops.

Depends on location. Cricket requires a ball that bounces. Football, you can play with a wad of left-over paper tied together with tape or strings.

Cricket puts restrictions on the pitch (ground must be fairly hard and even where the ball bounces) that are easily met in typically dry India but harder to meet in wet England, where they need to nurture/torture grass to get the right conditions (growing it to get long, strongly interleaving roots, but then drying out the ground and cutting the grass very short to not make the bouncing ball slip)

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

Rolling a bunch of socks together is.. a ball? Right?

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.

>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.

> 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.

It’s also “the sport”. Americans don’t really do casual sports anymore and there is a ton of competition in the various leagues.

In many parts of the US, soccer is a fall sport that competes with football in school leagues. Football teams require a small army of players and tend to suck out the oxygen. It doesn’t help that there’s no little league equivalent for soccer, so there’s a ton of pay to play BS to a much greater degree than football or baseball.

In my area, you need to commit to a full year travel soccer team that’s often owned by the school coach to get any playtime in high school.

USAmericans casually play basketball still. Basically a few kids shooting hoops at every little court you pass, and lightly organized (just show up at a time) adult games are common too.

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.