World Cup Odds
World Cup odds via the Athletic
I think the Americans got a tougher group than most think, but 80-1 seems like a pretty good price.
The Dutch at 11-1 seems like a good wager just because Group A is weak and the Group B runner-up won't be a power (provided it isn't England)--seems like a clear path to the quarterfinals.
The Germans at 10-1. They are ALWAYS around the quarterfinals or better and I believe 2018 was an aberration.
What say you?
We have like 330 million people here. How is a country like Croatia able to field a team better than us? What's the deal with that?
NFL and NBA, primarily. Soccer is far from the most popular sport in the United States, unlike most countries, and most of the best American athletes pursue football and basketball.
and baseball, hockey, lacrosse, wrestling, etc.
It's crazy to me how popular lacrosse is given that there's so little professional money available. Wrestling too come to think of it.
There's this idea in America that soccer is a sissy European sport. But it's like, look at all the money! And also it's not a sissy sport but the NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL propaganda machine / our cultural aversion has tricked a bunch of kids that will never be bigger than 5'10 170lbs into being great HS cornerbacks and shortstops and PGs when they'd have a much better chance of being pro soccer players.
could be a well-earned reputation:
you'd never see this on a football field/hockey surface, and the examples are legion if you search the web
For one, this absolutely does happen on the football field, albeit less often: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvgNHK6bvbY
And I'm not denying there are players that do sissy things, but in the normal run of play, soccer is pretty brutal and they're not wearing the kind of armor that football and hockey players are wearing. And part of reason for the gamesmanship is to just get a break since, you know, there are no stoppages and no substitutions. Talk about tough.
Soccer is a MUCH more physically taxing sport than basketball. Basketball is my favorite sport, but it is not nearly as dangerous as soccer.
not saying soccer isn't a sport and can be difficult. it can. just commenting that the greatest and far and away the toughest athletes on planet earth play football, hockey, lacrosse, wrestle, and some play basketball. are there tough downhill skiers? you bet. cross country runners? yep, them, too, and some other sports like mountain climbing, for instance. but for shear physical excellence and tough, the main sports in our country are king, and soccer isn't one of them.
yeahhhhhh. uh. ok.
for one, hockey players are tough and very skilled but they are not generally elite athletes. no sport that is 99% white and 50% canadian (which represents an infinitesimally small proportion of the worlds population) can possibly claim to have the greatest athletes in the world. it's just far too small of a pool from which the players are drawn. Ditto for lacrosse which is an even smaller pool.
you say that, but tell me who are the biggest, fastest, strongest, best coordinated, best vertical, etc. athletes on our planet? you're not going to say its soccer players, are you?
EDIT: you added a whole second paragraph to your original post. i'm talking overall, and yes, the NHL players are outstanding athletes and tough as nails.
as to soccer one other thing, though certainly anecdotal. when there was a threat of no football b/c of covid and only soccer in our town, our twins and a number of my football players played soccer for two weeks. the soccer coach had never had such athletes, and even though my guys had never played soccer in their lives, they won both games they played by double-digits. fortunately football was then approved and no more soccer needed to fill in.
If this is actually a true story, it was certainly a terrible soccer team and league. I've never seen a football player who is a good soccer player, certainly not one who'd never played before. Also I could easily say based on sheer numbers and every player on every team having similar traits that the fastest, best coordinated, and highest jumping athletes on the planet are playing soccer. At the highest level soccer players are stopping a ball on a dime that's coming on a line with either their foot or another body part that no other athlete uses (chest, thigh, head), then keeping a ball at their feet and maneuvering it around opponents at full speed, and kicking it 70 mph at a target in the goal say about 2ft by 2ft if they're scoring consistently. A WR in football is... catching a ball. Is someone gonna hit him hard? Sure. That takes courage, not more coordination than what I just described. To say football players or even basketball players have more coordination is laughable, as is your statement above that basketball players are among the toughest?? What a joke. You clearly haven't watched the game. It's obvious from your disdain for it that you would have never wanted to because of a very weird, but all too common, tough guy prejudice against it.
tougher, faster, quicker, stronger, shooting (or stopping) a frozen puck over 100 mph that will smash bones and blind you, not just a ball that is soft. and yeah, we didn't take shifts off when we got dinged up. in juniors when we fought they would literally stitch our knuckles up on the bench between shifts. and as to football players, they can do all that a soccer player can do, much faster, and then leap in the air 3' and catch the ball with one hand, in the snow, and that's not even the pros, but just a decent D-1 receiver.
but more to the point, take the athletes we're talking about out of their regular sport and have them do, say, a decathlon. soccer players might win the marathon, but the 100/hurdles/javelin/ etc? it would be a joke. there are no soccer players like calvin johnson, d.k. metcalf, tariq hill, and 100 others you could name.
and that brings us back to the actual, original point that someone else made, their words paraphrased: soccer is for european pussies. on the whole, that is accurate. i'm glad people play, i'm glad they enjoy it and watching it, but the best and toughest athletes on our planet don't play that game.
Your ignorance and/or bias is showing. Players like Antonio Rudiger, Adama Traore and others all have clocked in-game speed faster than Calvin Johnson. Your point that football players can catch a ball while running--top soccer players can receive a ball on their foot at the end of a full run, can jump and accurately redirect the ball with their heads, etc. That's a lot harder than simply catching a ball-try it.
Soccer balls weigh a full pound, are shot up to 70 mph. Defenders block shots with their faces (among other unpadded body parts) and barely flinch.
Is getting slashed or hit with a hockey stick more painful, sure, but the toughest, no way - muy thai, bareknuckle boxing, mma are all "tougher"--which in my opinion is a remarkably stupid comparison point anyways. The likelihood of suffering a debilitating injury isn't what makes a sport entertaining to me.
That's a complicated question since different sports have different weights on each of those criteria but if "biggest" (which isn't really athleticism to me) is amongst the criteria, it's basketball and/or football (even though football positions all have different mixes of size, speed, agility, etc that are required).
But where massive size/height is mostly a necessity in bball and football (position caveats aside), it carries little weight for soccer and hockey players because the game is played mostly on the ground / ice and speed, agility and coordination (in addition to skill of course) are what is required to be good. That's why most soccer and hockey players are not over 200 lbs and they're usually not over say, 6'2.
So given that soccer and hockey have similar athletic requirements (jumping matters in soccer too and some soccer players have crazy verticals to get headers but we'll forget that), let's do a thought exercise.
If hockey didn't exist and hockey players otherwise spent their time playing soccer, do you think any current NHL players would be playing top level soccer? Mayyyyybe a few. Tops. There simply aren't that many hockey players that would be joining the massive pool of worldwide soccer players and very few of them would match up athletically. If you think otherwise, what do you think is athletically special about a tiny group of canadians and scandinavians that is different from billions of Africans, Europeans, South Americans, etc?
But if soccer didn't exist and soccer players otherwise spent all their time playing hockey, the NHL would look entirely different. Do you disagree? Almost none of the current NHL players would be good enough to play. It's a very niche sport that most of the rest of the world doesn't play / doesn't have access to. That is not an opinion.
You are absolutely correct that most of the best athletes in the US do not play soccer, and likewise, most of the best athletes in the world do not play hockey (or football). But the best athletes almost everywhere else in the world do play soccer.
The irony of that is "big" people elsewhere in the world often size out of soccer and then you see some of them finding their way to football (Ojabo) or basketball (Embiid). Funny that small guys in the US pursue big guy sports and get sized out and big guys in other parts of the world play a small guy sport and get too big.
I loved the transition from "let's do a thought exercise" to "this is not an opinion".
Thank you for the comedy.
Hey, let's talk about this totally hypothetical situation that really can't be proven, but I'm going to say it isn't an opinion to push it off as fact.
Haha. I stated a fact while setting up the hypothetical. It is not a transition, it is a premise of the thought exercise.
It is a fact that very few kids are introduced to or have the opportunity to play hockey. And that far more of the world plays soccer.
You can try to argue that those kids that simply happen to live in cold weather countries and have access to ice time (and skates and sticks and...) somehow have some special athletic gifts that the kids in the vast majority of the rest of the world don't have, but you cannot argue the first point.
So why don't you try to make an argument? Answer any of the questions I proposed.
The average NHL player is 6'1" 200 pounds. So to say most NHL players aren't 200 pounds is inaccurate.
You make a bold assumption, hockey players would be bad at soccer, but soccer players would be good at hockey. Based on what?
Having played both sports the required skill-set could hardly be different. The primary quality required for hockey is hand to eye coordination - irrelevant in soccer. It's a way quicker game with wind-sprints and breaks. Soccer is about pace.
It's nice that soccer players have a good vertical, I'm not sure how that would help in hockey though.
Oh, is that inaccurate? The Red Wings roster on https://www.nhl.com/redwings/roster lists 17 of 28 players under 200 lbs. 17 of 25 non goalies. Are the Red Wings a much smaller team than a typical NHL team?
NHL players aren't that big. They are on average about 10-15 lbs heavier than soccer players but that's it.
Sprints aren't pace? Yes, hockey is hand-eye coordination and soccer is foot-work. But they're the closest sports in terms of athletic requirements compared to basketball and football.
I didn't say that the guys that end up being the best soccer players would necessarily end up being great hockey players. But I am saying that if all the guys that tried to be the best soccer players instead tried to be the best hockey players, and had the opportunity to do so, the NHL would look very different.
It's a simple numbers game. There's just no possible way that Canada, a country of 30 million people, most of whom are genetically indifferent from Europeans, somehow magically has the athletes that are best at hockey. They simply have the ice and the will and the resources to enable their kids to play a lot of hockey, and almost no one else plays hockey almost anywhere else in the world. So it's pretty much their own sport. Like cricket in India.
And on the other hand if that small number of players that try to be the best hockey players, tried to be the best soccer players, very few of them would break though. Again, it's a numbers game.
This is not difficult. Propose to me how you think somehow white Canadiens are so overrepresented in the NHL that doesn't have to do with access?
No I just pulled the number out of my ass.
https://www.stack.com/a/how-big-is-the-average-nhl-player/
The average modern NHL player is 6-foot-1 and 199.3 pounds.
Just like I said so yes that is so. Scrape any stupid deflection you want. It's difficult to change facts but keep trying.
You made the 2 simple statements
- The best soccer players would be professional hockey players.
- The best hockey players would not be professional soccer players.
To validate this argument you site the number of Canadians in the NHL? I don't agree with you. You suggested because a guy has a good vertical he's going to be a good hockey player. Sorry I don't follow that.
Processional sports are super specialized. Micheal Jordan a brilliant, driven, gifted athlete, certainly the best basketball of his era, couldn't crack the top 1000 of baseball players.
Yet somehow you think a soccer player who exclusively uses his legs is going to lace up skates, stick handle, deak, do feather passes, and pick the top corner with a precise wrist shots better than any hockey player currently playing?
Sorry I'm not following the thought process.
You realize that average is not the same as median, right? Also, 199 < 200. It's difficult to understand facts when you don't even know what words mean or how to use logic. Most NHL players are under 200 lbs. 100 percent fact.
You also can't read. I never said the best soccer players would be hockey players. I said if soccer players, meaning those who ever spend time playing soccer.
Wow, I can't even address all the logical fallacies and reading comprehension errors here.
Answer one simple question, if all the guys that play soccer in the world spent that time playing hockey instead, what would the NHL look like? Still 50% Canadians?
Many people say Tom Brady is the best athlete of all time.
I really thought we were past the stage of hur-hur football fans sitting around and bad-mouthing soccer? Didn't the making fun of flopping trope fade about ten years ago? You have an anecdote about some tough guys being tougher than some soccer guys and that's your scientific assessment of soccer toughness? Have mercy, is that tiresome. This is a game with about four billion more followers than American football, which many of us ALSO like. Who gives two potatoes about this sorry line of reasoning. Get with some of your own people and laugh into your Miller Lites about it, then--the rest of you should not give this kind of garbage oxygen.
That’s a ridiculous story about football players playing soccer.
There are different measures for toughest or most skilled athletes or the toughest sport. For toughest sports you have to look at water polo, Aussie rules football, boxing/mma, and probably rugby. Waterpolo is number 1 given everything that happens. Hockey is certainly up there. Football has some toughness in the trench battles but it doesn’t compare to any of these other sports. Aussie rules is like taking American football, removing the pads, keeping the hitting, and making them play constantly for an entire game without stopping like soccer. That is the biggest dig on football, that you stand around most of the time and don’t even play half of the game.
Other sports that are surprisingly tough include motocross. The physical demands of riding that bike at a high level are among the toughest. I’ve seen the sport end up in the top of a list like this a while back based on a study.
Soccer definitely is one if the toughest sports when looking at the combination of physical demands from playing non stop at the highest level with constant sprints and amazing speed with foot skills that are incredibly difficult to master. It’s easy to kick a ball around just like it’s easy to catch a ball, but top level foot skills are incredibly to master compared to other sports. Soccer doesn’t have the brutal battles like football, mma, Aussie, or rugby but who really needs that shit.
True the best athletes in the US don’t play soccer. Other sports get the media attention. Some do though and it’s changing.
Interesting you mentioned water polo. I've always thought that sport is some of the most insane levels of athleticism. It's sort of lacrosse with your hands vs equipment and or hockey/soccer. . All while swimming non stop !
Bro your kids played recreational soccer for 2 weeks which is where the beginners or those left behind stay. So yeah good athletes will show up and run right by who is in those leagues. Holy smoke it has nothing to do with high level soccer
Soccer player endurance swamps any other sport. Any soccer player who shows up from a high level team in HS the cross country and track coach will grab them immediately. If we are doing anecdotals that's reality.
Ps I am saying soccer players by and large aren't the fastest twitch guys on the planet so maybe we agree there. But their endurance is ridiculous. They cover way more distance every game then any other sport. And do it repeatedly not once a week like a football player or on a tiny surface like bball or hockey.
i'm not your bro, but i'd be happy to meet. it was high school soccer and 6 of my starters, including our twins, played it for a couple of weeks and ran circles around all the skilled, dedicated, soccer players.
I suspect your estimation of "skilled" soccer players may not be what would be considered "skilled" soccer players in many parts of the country, let alone outside of the U.S.
This is a very lame comment. And utterly lacking in rigor. Butt turkey machismo.
The number of times an American football player fakes an injury towards the end of a game to get a break or slow down a team driving down the field is almost on a gamely basis; or a basketball player faking getting fouled or brutally embellishing being fouled is almost on a possession basis. This notion that European football players are the only “floppers” in sports is ridiculous.
People need to get off their American high horse and realize that European football is the most popular sport in the world. I enjoy it myself because it is an art, and it is an uninterrupted 120 minutes of gameplay versus hundreds of commercials each game in basketball/football and the end of basketball games taking 15 minutes to complete 30 seconds of gameplay.
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world because it requires a singular ball and really nothing else so every country in the world plays it. That’s pretty much it.
Soccer is my favorite sport to watch. I played college basketball and at age 44, now I play in a soccer rec league. Most physically grueling sport I’ve ever played. I used to think it was a sissy sport. What a fucking idiot I was to think that. Plus watching on tv is better than anything. 2 hours, no commercials. It’s great. I find it hilarious that the soccer haters really react to any soccer post here. I find hockey and baseball completely boring, but I don’t waste time posting about those sports
This was started by the South American teams over 50 years ago and spread because every free kick is so valuable compared to other sports. Basketball is similar with flops and free throws. The bad acting is comical.
Anyone who doesn't think football players fake injuries at times hasn't followed the sport in the last 15 years.
In 2020, 1.7 million US kids between the age of 6 and 12 played organized soccer. That's as many as played football (tackle and flag combined), and far, far more than lacrosse or wrestling.
If we're comparing with Croatia, the total population of that country - men, women, and children - is 4 million. Their pool of available players is far smaller than ours.
But what happens in Europe is that kids enter the youth section of pro clubs when they're really young and have elite coaches training them from then on . . . while here, most of our kids are just playing for their neighborhood team or "travel soccer" which is not the same.
Our problem is not that no one wants to play, it's that parents aren't real comfortable with the idea of having Junior go play for the youth section of L.A. Galaxy, when other sports don't demand that kind of thing.
Don't other sports do that kind of thing though? AAU basketball teams are travelling all over the country now, kids are transferring to IMG to play football, every great young tennis player moves to the South, every great winter sport athlete moves out west. I don't think it's that uncommon, and the fact that parents actually are letting their kids do that is what has contributed to the talent pool for the USMNT getting so much better in the last 5-10 years. Remember when Freddy Adu was all the rage? He wouldn't sniff a spot on this team. This is by far the best talent the USMNT has ever had. They're just very young and have to prove it.
Junior hockey also regularly has 15-16 year olds leaving home to live with billet families across the country, and across the border in many cases.
It's not the travel. It's leaving the house. In other countries kids will leave their house to go live at club's training academies when they are as young as elementary school kids. They go to school at the training academy for half a day and then go to soccer training for the vast majority of the remainder of the day. The closest thing I can think of for the US would be the IMG school in Florida but as far as I know, and I could be wrong, IMG is only high school and it's not associated with any professional teams.
Don't other sports do that kind of thing though? AAU basketball teams are travelling all over the country now
AAU basketball is not what I'd call getting elite coaching. AAU coaches are just random dudes for the most part.
IMG is more like it, but it's just one school. In Europe, this is everywhere - every pro club has a youth section and all the future players (just about) go through it. And they start when they're like 6 or 7. That's the thing about soccer - you've got to start early to be really good at it. A lot of American kids do start playing at that age, but for most of them it's just a bit of exercise, it's nothing serious.
for one, does "kids" in your 1.7 figure include girls? because if so, the football numbers don't include nearly as many girls so it's not really apples to apples.
and second, you're right, the volume doesn't matter, per se. it's who is playing it and absolutely to your point, how much are they playing it. most kids that "play" soccer are being stuck in it for an hour a week between piano lessons and boy scouts but they're never going to be good.
i do think the who is more important than you think, and that we'd be a lot better if more elite athletes that are otherwise playing cornerback, shortstop, point guard were playing soccer and going into the funnel and that we were developing them.
My experience with youth soccer was a “try it” sport. Simple AYSO at 4 or 5 years old to get out, have fun, interact with other kids and learn team concepts. Granted this was 20+ years ago now, but I don’t think that was at all abnormal.
Soccer is probably the cheapest sport for young kids to play, as well as being the sport easiest for young kids to play. So naturally, it’s common for young kids. As kids grow older and develop an interest in the more popular sports, soccer fades and the amount of kids that are serious about the sport dwindles. The issue in comparison to other countries is that soccer IS the “popular sport” there. Smaller countries where soccer is #1 can compete with larger countries where it’s 5th or 6th.
For me, I played soccer, baseball (t-ball), and hockey when I was 4 and 5. I ended up dropping soccer entirely because it wasn’t interesting to me, focused primarily on hockey and continued with baseball because it worked with my hockey schedule.
I would guess a lot of kids follow a similar trajectory. Once football starts at 7 or 8, you lose a good chunk of those kids. Once schools introduce basketball and youth leagues start, you lose more. Girls start drifting to things like softball, basketball, and volleyball as those are introduced.
Yes, 100 percent agree and this is the experience for most american kids. But I submit that it becomes "not interesting" solely for cultural reasons.
We idolize hockey players lifting the Stanley Cup, we emulate Michael Jordan hitting a game winning shot, we go to HS football games and play under the bleachers while the whole town cheers on our older brothers. Our fathers speak glowingly of "tough" football players while denigrating sissy soccer players which is total nonsense propaganda. I mean, listen to XM!
There was no soccer even on TV while we grew up. It was a curiosity. It was/is not glamorous. Soccer stars are not famous here.
But in most of the rest of the world, this is totally flipped around. So other kids dream of being the next Pele and Beckham and Mane and Salah.
Soccer is a great game. Football (American) is a great game. Basketball is a great game. Hockey is a great game. But the popularity of these sports is divided very much along arbitrary borders. Are we so different as people?
No. The varying levels of interest is purely cultural (on a macro scale).
Interesting statistic from the page you linked to is that participation in youth soccer declined by nearly twenty percent over the last decade in the US! That is mind blowing. Growing up in Ann arbor in the eighties abd nineties, it seemed like everyone played soccer (even if they played other sports) and the popularity was growing all the time.
Now, during that same time period, participation in tackle football and flag football was also declining rapidly, but not as fast as soccer. I assumed that the drop off in football participation would be much bigger due to revelations about CTE. And I assumed that soccer would be growing as fewer kids play football.
That study goes completely counter to my expectations.
Soccer has really high concussion risk as well. So anyone concerned about CTE risks enough to take their kids out of football probably wouldn't put them in soccer.
My guess is lacrosse is taking away a lot of kids that formerly played soccer. All of my brothers kids play lacrosse which wasn't even an option in Michigan when we were growing up.
Perhaps also a general movement away from organized sports as parents don't feel the need to have their kids play the sportsballs.
most of the best American athletes pursue football and basketball.
People love to make this argument, even though the U.S. team for years now has had perfectly good athletes. And there is no shortage of young Americans playing soccer. Numbers and athleticism are not the issue (and haven't been for a generation).
Our problem has been the way we train young players and develop their skills. The standard U.S. model of keeping athletes amateur until age 18 and playing for their school team doesn't work well for soccer. The USSF is figuring this out and rethinking youth development, but we're still quite a bit behind other countries.
1) The US hasn't had perfectly good athletes at every position. Tim Ream and Micheal Bradley (amongst others) are not even close to world class athletes. We have made a lot of progress on that front in the last ten years though.
2) But the key is that you need both athleticism and skill to be elite. So you need a lot of great athletes at the top of the funnel to get guys that are both athletic and skilled at the bottom of the funnel.
Yes, some good athletes have made the team but few (none?) of them also had world class skill.
Development of that skill is a factor, yes. And so is putting more of them in the top of the funnel.
You can find slow guys on a lot of national teams. Not that many countries can come up with a stud athlete at all 11 spots. If you can do enough with a ball at your feet, you can get by.
If you were to take our players' average 40 time, shuttle run and so forth and compare it to other countries', I doubt you'd see that big of a difference. We also usually have pretty good size. Fans are too fixated on this stuff.
Yes, but there aren't slow guys on elite national teams. Those teams don't have players that are "getting by". This is a discussion about why the USA which dominates most sports athletically doesn't do the same in soccer.
We're talking about how to go from 15th (which is pretty good! better than most teams that also have some slow guys) to first and part if it is making sure each of the 11 is both athletic and skilled.
And I agree that the problem isn't only that we have a couple subpar athletes (which really isn't even the case anymore).
The problem is that our athletes aren't skilled enough, right? The development crowd isn't necessary wrong that would could develop them earlier and more intensely, but there's also a volume impact. If you have 200,000 good athletes that start out playing soccer the odds of getting enough guys obsessed with soccer enough to put in the time to be extremely skilled such that you have 25 skilled and athletic players is higher than if you start with 100,000. It just is.
This.
my point stands: as a generalization the best athletes in the U.S. do not play soccer, period, end of story. i see this offends you and a few others, but its not a comment on whether soccer is a sport, or is a challenge to play well, etc, its merely a comment on the fact that our best athletes don't play that sport.
Yeah, but I don't think the biggest, toughest, strongest football/baseball/basketball style athletes necessarily make the best soccer players. Being big and muscle-bound is not an asset in soccer. Is Lebron a great athlete? Of course, but he's 6'8" and 200-something pounds and that's a lot to haul around a soccer field for 90 minutes. He probably wouldn't be great on the balance beam either.
And at the same time, that denigrates the athletic abilities of soccer players. A guy like Christian Pulisic may not be able to dunk a basketball or hit a 400-foot home run but he is fantastically athletic and extremely skilled. He's very fast, quick and agile with great balance and he can run around for 90 minutes while also making pinpoint passes, taking powerful shots and getting hacked down by defenders. That's very impressive.
I see your point but I think it's fair to say that not all athletes are interchangeable. [Also: people keep saying we're not good at soccer and it's not popular here but this isn't the 70s/80s anymore: the US may underachieve but they're pretty consistently in the World Cup now. And the MLS and even Euro league teams have pretty strong followings in the States now. And don't forget the US women: they're very popular and have been more successful than the men.]
That's also, quite literally, not what your "point" was. Above, you stated "the greatest and far and away the toughest athletes on planet earth play football, hockey, lacrosse, wrestle, and some play basketball." You've changed your argument to "in the U.S."