OT - LeBron would not save U.S. soccer
A piece refuting the oft-repeated suggestion that we'd be kicking butt if we just had some of our NBA athletes playing soccer instead.
NBA athletes need to focus on keeping Basketball in the same breath as Football and Baseball.
LeBron would never play striker. He would be a keeper.
Also, this article is just plain dumb.
If Drogba can be a world class striker with his physicality, so could LeBron.
And I agree, the article is pretty dumb
Physicality is one small component of what makes a great soccer player.
Acting hurt is probably more important.
There are plenty of well built "physical" athletes in the world that couldn't play soccer if their life depended on it. These two sports don't even have remotely similar skill sets. I am not saying LJ can't play soccer (I have no idea), but the suggestion that because he is big, fast and athletic means he can dominate any sport is a little ridiculous.
LeBron wouldn't be a keeper, either. He would be a basketball player.
Obviously if you took athletes conditioned for football and threw them on the soccer field without practice, they are not going to be fit to play soccer. That's not the argument people make.
Did you actually read through the article, or just wrote it off because you disagreed with its premise? I think this is a key point he makes:
Now consider physiology. The ideal sprinter is tall and muscled, with a high percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers that quickly burn energy and produce short, explosive runs. By contrast, the perfect distance runner is of short to medium height, with a high percentage of slow-twitch fibers that burn energy slowly and facilitate endurance. Ask yourself: Which of the above sounds more like an NFL receiver? Which sounds more like a central midfielder?
Your average NBA/NFL player flat-out isn't built to play soccer. It has nothing to do with conditioning and everything to do with body type.
Steve Smith, Santana Moss, Wes Welker...they're kinda soccer playerish.
Ocho-Cinco, too.
I bet Martavious Odoms would have been a pretty incredible soccer player.
Erm, a lot of soccer conditioning involving running involves interval training. As in, involves running quickly/sprinting for short distances and then some light jogging/walking. Which is exactly what you do as a midfielder. Nor do I fully understand the whole short to medium comment. Bradley is 6'2". Dempsey is 6'1". I can think of someone like Trochowski fitting that description.
Just seems a bit off.
According to the Times of London, the average Premier League midfielder runs more than seven miles per match, a 10th of that sprinting speed or close to it. Average recovery time between sprints? All of 40 seconds, with few substitutions and no timeouts.Hmmmm....how long is an NFL play clock? How many yards is the average receiver route? How many plays....? And almost all those are FULL sprinting speed, other than the occasional all out run block. Sure they sub, and switch sides, but probably no more than soccer players stand around watching the ball at the other end of the field. And if you want endurance, consider basketball, where you are running up and down the court back and forth over and over, in short bursts. THAT takes endurance. Sure, they rest in the pros, but all these guys started by playing pick up ball, where you didn't have subs, you just played. And usually you kept the court till you lost, so it was game after game after game. And it doesn't even account for all the people who are saying so and so would make a good goalie. Because obviously there's a completely different skill set involved there. Because they don't run anywhere. They really just watch the game, then have to make spectacular plays so many times a game. But it's NOT an endurance position. I mean, he's using marathon data for a sport that's far closer to the other sports than it is a long distance run. And while we're on the physical....the idea that all these teams use smaller athletes because they're better suited to the type of athlete needed...anyone think a lot of countries use those types of athletes because those are the kind they have? America, between population, nutrition, and variety of nationalities in it has more tall people than the average country. You could take one of these countries basketball teams if all you needed was height, sure...but they wouldn't be the best athletes. But in America, they can be tall AND good athletes. And as we all know, big and fast is better than just fast any day.
But the point is that we spread our top-flight talent among football, basketball, baseball, hockey and soccer (and about 37 other sports). More often or not, the Big 4 get the first crack at most of the athletes that meet their description of the ideal soccer player. We dilute the talent pool and pluck off some of the best talent before the high school soccer teams pick their squads.
Shaq might not have made a great striker. But I'd guess Jason Kidd, Allen Iverson, Chris Paul, Charles Woodson, and Barry Sanders might have been pretty damn good if they'd started in soccer rather than in their respective sports. Or think about the notion of Waterbug Slot Ninjas on the pitch.
IMHO, I'd suspect that Brandon Inge would have made for a hell of a midfielder.
There are hundreds of thousands of kids every year who have the ideal soccer body, but grow up playing basketball and football instead of soccer despite the fact that they will never play professionally. They certainly would help America's soccer team if they focused on soccer instead of football. I think this is completely lost on the author.
This is exactly the argument I make with other folks on this topic. Sure, its fun to think of Griffey Jr. as a goalie (hand-eye, range, strong hands, etc), but its also possible he would've sucked at soccer because its completely different.
But for every case where LeBron, Griffey, Tomlinson, etc flame out in soccer, there's some guy who flamed out in football halfway through his first season of D-III who would have been a great soccer player.
So, you can't really put NBA/NHL/NFL stars right onto the pitch, but you can approximate the number of uber-talented stars if soccer was the only sport here. You've gotta figure the proportions and magnitude of success would be about the same.
The only reason they're not conditioned to play soccer is because they have been conditioning for their respective sports all of their lives.
I'm not saying every elite NBA/NFL athlete would translate to soccer, but to simply dimiss freaks of nature like LeBron James is a little bit foolish. If Kobe Bryant wanted to be the best soccer player in the world from age 2 on, I wouldn't doubt that he would be one of the best. That type of work ethic and desire is found in .000000000001% of athletes.
lebron cant even win a title in his own sport.
like Darren Sproles or Denard? They would be ideal, correct?
It's like any other sport in that each position requires different body types, training, etc. Putting Denard at striker (when he was say, 6) and having him develop the same amount of speed would be, well, incredible. Then again, that's not to say he would develop the necessary ball skills. And another Robbie Findley we can take a pass on.
Why do people assume NBA players would make good soccer players?! I don't think its a coincidence every other country is not playing 6'8" soccer players......if anything baseball. hockey, and some of the skill positions in football would be producing decent soccer athletes
Is every NBA player over 6'4"? I'm guessing Allen Iverson or Derrick Rose could have done some incredible things on the pitch.
The average height for NBA players is 6'7"....so those 2 are definitely in the minority.
I just find the whole suggestion that the United States has some class of athletes that is vastly superior to the rest of the world and would dominate if only the put their mind too it is arogance in the extreme. Yes, good athletes can make good soccer players, and this country has quite a few atheletes, but so does the rest of the world.
its not as if we posess some untapped mega resource of previously unimagingable potential. Extremely athletic americans wouldn't be inherantly any better then extremely athletic Brazilian or French players.
Do you watch the olympics? There is a reason the US is arrogant.
Also, even if our athletes aren't inherently better, we have the capital, and resources to make them better.
EDIT: I hate to sound too jingoistic, but every major sport the US is truly interested in has a league here in the US, and all of the best players from around the world come to play in those leagues. So we clearly have resources that a lot of other countries do not, when it comes to sports.
Thanks for giiving the expected response. Were an extremely large country, so we have advantages. But our athletes are no better then you'd find elsewhere. Look at the medal count from the last Summer Olympics.
The United States with 300 million people won 110 Medals.
France (62 million) Great Britain (61 million) and Germany (82 million) accounted for 128 with only 68% combined population.
American athletes are no better then what you'd find in Europe.
Taking population into account makes zero sense in this discussion because the size of our population means that we would be more likely to produce more (in terms of sheer quantity) elite athletes, and therefore, we would be more likely to have a better soccer team.
We might not be better in terms of producing elite athletes than other countires (on a per person basis), but the size of our population means we produce more of them, so therefore, there is a higher probability that our teams will have more talent, although not necessarily better talent.
I wasn't arguing against the advantage of having a larger population, I was simply saying what you were saying.
We might not be better in terms of producing elite athletes than other countires (on a per person basis), but our population means we produce more of them,
I think I pretty much said the same thing in my original post, our athletes wouldn't be of any major improvement on what you'd find elsewhere. We simply have a larger pool to chose from, big deal.
will contain MORE elite athletes. When you're trying to put together a squad with elite athletes from top-to-bottom, that larger pool is a huge advantage.
We're talking about the difference between the Ivory Coast (great talent in Drogba and a couple of others, but not much depth) and Brazil (ridiculous athletes from top to bottom).
Sure a larger pool will contain more elite athletes. My objection is all of the names thrown out are being cited because of their athleticism alone. I think Jose Altidore is emblematic of the problem with this. Physically, as a target man, he's world class, every bit the player of say, Luis Fabiano, but technically the comparison is just a laugh. It's foolish to hold out hope that any of these specific athletes would do any better on the ball, and that, much more than athleticism, is what the US is lacking.
That the world cup gave handicaps for size of country.
My favorite part of the world cup is getting to listen to guys that played high school soccer talk about how much harder it is to play soccer than any other sport, and how much better the athletes are. Its quite entertaining.
This is kind of a faulty argument since, regardless of the size of the country, there is a limit to the number of participants you can put in each event. If every country could put all its world-class performers in any sport into that Olympic event, then I'd expect medal counts to be more skewed for larger countries. But, that's not the case- the US gets the same number of participants in any event as those [comparatively] smaller countries, and with the margins between all those top athletes being so slim, having a bigger pool to choose from doesn't provide that much benefit in the end.
You could be right about the fact that there may be a "maximum" number of athletes a country has competing in a specific event, but all countries do not have equal representation. Many countries aren't represented at all and lots of smaller countries have their one elite athlete competing. So yeah.....size matters.
Edit....TWSS
Being a larger country with more resources allows USA to groom more world-class athletes, but the bottleneck is that only a select few can qualify for the Olympics. I believe the limit is three for most/all individual events and two for group events (relays, bobsled, etc.).
That is relevant because if USA has 20 of the top 50 athletes in the world in some event, only three of them get to go to the Olympics, so USA only gets to put three up against however many dozens of other athletes are also in that event from around the world. Most of the smaller countries mentioned before- France, Germany, etc.- are only small compared to USA; they are still large enough to encover several world-class athletes in any given event. They could each come up with four or five athletes to compete with the 20 from USA.
I suspect that if there were no limits on number of qualifications per country, and that if medals were extended out to, say, top 50, you would see an overwhelming advantage for the USA in medal count.
Of course, this is all opinion and theory, with absolutely no evidence to back any of it up. So I'm probably wrong.
Also, yes- TWSS.
Because you're comparing countries where the best athletes play soccer, and after you've field X squads of that, well, most of the rest are in Olympic sports. Particularly when you consider that most of those medals probably came from Germany. Where, in the US, after football, baseball, basketball, maybe hockey, soccer, golf, NASCAR (yeah, what kinda athlete is in racing? Well, what kind of athlete is in Luge? The greatest Luger of all time trained on beer and was more out of shape than me), etc, etc....then you get some Olympic athletes. Why? Well, because they're a lot more money for being a lot less elite in those other sports. Where if you're not bringing home a boatload of Olympic medals, you better have another job, or be named Michelle Kwan.
We have a lot of inherent advantages as a nation.
At 300 million people, the United States is the 3rd most populous country in the world. We have more than twice the combined population of the four teams in the semi-finals. While our players might not be more talented per se, statistics suggests that (ceteris paribus) we will have more talented players than the Brazilians and the French combined.
We also have the financial resources to discover and develop talent that doesn't exist in a lot of countries.
Plenty of talls guys have been good at soccer. Jan Koller of the Czech Repulic is 6'7 and plays forward. Peter Crouch of England is 6'7 plays forward. Luol Deng played for the English Youth National team. Alot of center backs are big dudes.
It honestly just depends on the person. Its takes their whole lives and hard training to be at that level.
6'6"
Not to mention the ridiculously tall keepers like Edwin van der Sar of Man U (6'6''), Peter Cech of Chelsea (6'5''), and Kristof van Hout , the Belgian keeper (6'10''). LeBron, I would wager, is far more athletic than any of these men.
You realize goalkeeping has always been America's strongest suit, right? Also, would you wager Dirk Nowitzki is way more athletic than Jens Lehman or Oliver Kahn (famous German goalkeepers)? Those guys are 6'2" and 6'3" by the way. The three best goalies in the world, by my estimation, Gigi Buffon, Iker Casillas and Julio Cesar, are 6'3, 6' flat and 6'1", respectively. I don't think Germany, Spain, Italy and Brazil are saying, "If only we could put Nowitzki/Pau Gasol/Andrea Bargnani/Nene playing goal." Not because they've never thought of it, but because they know better.
Yes, I do.
Also, wtf, Dirk, Pau, Andrea, and Nene compared to LeBron? Really? They're not even comparable in basketball, let alone athleticism. Then you compare them to three of the best goal keepers in the sport and not only that, but take gumpy unathletic tall guys like Dirk/Andrea and compare them to Kahn and Lehmann? That's one hell of a straw man you've set up (Seriously, fucking Nene as an example?). Why not throw out Shaq, Yao Ming, and DJ Mbenga to further solidify your point?
Dude as far as Nene goes, he has never had any discernable basketball skills and locked in a 6 year 60 million dollar contract a few years ago solely because he is 6'11" and a freak. LeBron is 6'8" and has buckets of skills that have no application in soccer. It's not a stretch. Dirk, Pau and Andrea, fine, but the overarching point, which you've ignored, is that none of the world's best goalies are anywhere close to 6'9", the only ones who reach 6'6" are Van der Sar and Petr Cech. Since the supposed benefits of a larger goalie are obvious, it woudl be foolish to think it's an experiment that hasn't been tried many times in many places. Also, I've never heard of the 6'10" Belgian goalie you mentioned.
Dude as far as Nene goes, he has never had any discernable basketball skills and locked in a 6 year 60 million dollar contract a few years ago solely because he is 6'11" and a freak. LeBron is 6'8" and has buckets of skills that have no application in soccer. It's not a stretch. Dirk, Pau and Andrea, fine, but the overarching point, which you've ignored, is that none of the world's best goalies are anywhere close to 6'9", the only ones who reach 6'6" are Van der Sar and Petr Cech. Since the supposed benefits of a larger goalie are obvious, it woudl be foolish to think it's an experiment that hasn't been tried many times in many places. Also, I've never heard of the 6'10" Belgian goalie you mentioned.
Hah, I was a little harsh, seeing as it was right before I went to bed. I guess my main point was. If you compared LeBron's measurables to any of the top keepers in the world, in terms of hand size, strength, speed, footwork, agility, leaping ability, etc....he would probably be the most athletic goalie in the world, and his athleticisism would more than make up for the extra 2 inches he has over other top flight keepers like vander Sar and Cech. So therefore, if he had been trained properly from a very young age on how to play the keeper position, I'm sure he would be one of the better keepers in the world. He is just that much more athletic than anyone else IMO.
Naming three players who have succeeded (actually 2 since Dang obviously didn't succeed) in soccer that are above 6'4" when taking into account the thousands that play professionally is not really proving a point (at least not the one you are trying to make).
You will rarely find players playing professional soccer that exceed 6'4" unless they are the teams keeper. Even the CB's are most often 6'4" or less. Notice I say most, as I know exceptions exist, but they are just that.....exceptions.
Also, P. Crouch is plain awful. I have never seen a guy his size lose out on more balls in the air. The only reason the guy is even pro is because people think he can be a weapon in the box. He seems to be proving why most soccer players aren't that tall. Koller on the other hand was a beast.
Well, I imagine in the near future he'd be able to make a very large donation. Will that help?
I am astonished that Rick Reilly did not write that article
I thought Rick Reilly dealt exclusively in transforming superficially interesting anecdotes into generalizations, not hypotheticals.