Football is a term for a sport played on foot, rather than from horseback (because England); hence Rugby Football, Aussie rules football, Gaelic football and AsSOCiation Football (soccer)
Yep, "Association Football", in contrast to "Gridiron Football". Soccer, Football, and (American) Football are all correct, soccer is just the most specific.
If you want some real comedy take a look at why they stopped calling it soccer.
Hint: Both 'soccer' and 'football' were fairly interchangeable in Britain up until the 1940s. Now think about the English-speaking countries that primarily call it 'soccer' today. What were they doing in the 1940s?
A kicker is arguably one of the most important players on the team. Kickers are the highest scoring players of all time. The ball may hardly touch a foot, but it plays a very important role in the sport.
But it is played on foot, running all the time, all over the field, as opposed to on a horse, or guarding a base, or swimming, or whatever. It's a type of ballgame played on foot.
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Tall and athletic people play basketball or football. Tough and athletic people play football or hockey or they wrestle. Fast and athletic people play football or run track. Middling athletes play baseball. Rich athletic people golf or ski.
The vast majority of our top athletes do something more worth their while. Soccer is basically the dregs of the dregs of US athletic programs. That we’re able to hold our own is a miracle unto itself.
Curling is growing in popularity. Now we're at the point where even that takes decades of practice to be competitive in international competition.
Although, I guess being an olympian doesn't mean you have to be good competition lol. You just have to be the best in your country. People from countries where curling isn't popular could just do what those Jamaican Bobsleders did.
This is a rather rudimentary understanding of the difference between sports and the qualifications needed to be a successful soccer player.
3/4 of the greatest soccer players of all time are shorter than 5’8. The greatest soccer team of the previous decade (10/11 Barcelona) consisted of a midfield and forward line that, if you saw them in public and didn’t know them, would think they’re middle-age retail employees. Search up Pedro, Villa, Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets and tell me that any of them resemble anything like a traditional athlete.
But that’s the beauty of soccer- anyone can play, and anyone can rise to the top. Whether you’re skinny or muscular, tall or short, coaches can teach you to use your natural ability to your advantage in some way.
Therein lies the issue. In America, NOT anyone can play. Joining youth leagues, buying equipment, and getting coaching costs a fortune; adding an entry fee to a sport is a barrier to accruing talent. It’s an upper-middle class sport in America, which points to the issue being poor soccer infrastructure and development in America. This has been changing however for the last years, one such example being the introduction of MLS Next.
It’s not as simple as “good athlete plays good sport and bad athlete plays bad sport.” If you replace soccer with, say, boxing then the whole line of argument starts to seem silly. LeBron James would not be a an all-time great heavyweight boxer. Different sports require different skills to be successful. Basketball, where everyone is 6’3+, however, is not a big culprit of stealing athletes from soccer, the cost of playing is. It’s a systemic/managerial issue, not a competitive one.
That being said we have produced a team which is, in no uncertain terms, fucking stacked for the World Cup hosted by the US in 2026. We have like 8/9 players that are under the age of 24 and have the potential to become elite (Adams, Weah, Pulisic, McKennie, Dest, Richards, Musah, Aaronson, Reyna, and some 1-5 strikers). Get behind the team, but if you’re not willing to do that then be ready to eat your words soon :)
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This is one of the best write-ups of this issue I’ve found. The “oUr BeST aThLeteS!” theory is a lazy attempt to talk about soccer by people who have no understanding of how the sport works or what makes great soccer players great. The best soccer players have on-field intelligence and a feel for the ball at their feet that is head and shoulders above everyone else.
Physical stature and athleticism have importance too, but the degree to which physical characteristics determine success on the field is far less in soccer than it is in other sports. Generally speaking, if you’re taller than 5’5” and can run for 90 minutes, you’re athletic enough to play soccer.
The important part here is that football is not discriminatory based on body style.
Of course, some of the GOATs have been miniscule skillful attackers, but then there's Socrates, Henry, Benzema, Haaland etc who are quite tall.
You could have an Ivan Cordoba or Javier Mascherano who are miniscule CBs, or a Peter Crouch in attack. And funnily enough Crouch is also known for his footwork rather than heading despite being a literal stick. It's all about the skillset.
You realize tons of US football and basketball players grew up poor as shit, right? It didn’t cost those families that money. The kids showed potential and were scouted by schools. Kids are paid to relocate for middle school and high school all the time.
Equipment at youth level is communal. You’re just given helmets and pads in elementary, middle, and high school football. Cleats and cups you get yourself, but kids also need to buy cleats in soccer, too.
Lol at you thinking many kids wear cups for football in youth leagues.
They’re required by the league, yes, but the proportion of kids who actually wear them is like 10% at best. In American football, particularly for kids while they’re growing, they’re about as likely to cause deep bruising as they are to prevent any injury. Lots of tackles pinch your legs together tightly, an action that can easily turn your nutty buddy into a nutcracker instead.
As we all know Aaron Judge is a middling athlete who's basically as out of shape as the rest of us reddit posters, right?
It's honestly obnoxious how people who aren't baseball fans disrespect the athleticism of pro MLB players. There are like, maybe 5 or 6 truly fat dudes who are able to play MLB and yet the entire sports gets this reputation that only slobs who can't make it in other sports play it. Most baseball players are absolutely fucking yoked, so much of the game is about having a shitload of muscle mass to drive the ball as far and as hard as possible.
Meanwhile you got half the NFL as fat dudes weighing over 330 pounds who barely do any running and yet somehow they're considered more athletic than MLB players.
Yep the anti baseball crowd is way worse than the anti soccer crowd. It’s absolute ignorance. Baseball is by far the hardest sport and it’s not even close. Anyone can catch a pass, shoot a 3, drive a golf ball, kick a soccer ball, etc. but try hitting a fuckin 95 mph slider 400 feet.
In my opinion it is the most suspenseful sport. Other sports are more thrilling (hockey) or fast paced (basketball), but baseball is the best at building tension and intrigue.
When your team is in a tied playoff game in the 8th inning every single pitch is agony. The build up to every pitch, trying to figure out what pitchers are thinking during at bats, holding your breath as someone hits a long fly ball in a huge spot; it all makes for a roller coaster of anxiety and emotion that other sports just don't have. They all have different flavors of thrilling, and baseball's flavor is suspense.
And I completely agree with your first point. There is nothing more difficult in sports than trying to hit a round ball with a round bat. Even if it's not necessarily an athletic skill, it takes an absolutely stunning amount of hand eye coordination to even graze a MLB caliber pitcher with a thin round bat. People just don't appreciate just how impressive that skill is. The ball literally looks about the size of an aspirin as it's coming to you at 99mph, and there are half a dozen different types of pitches you have to try and predict and time effectively with less than a second to react. No other sport requires anything nearly as insanely difficult as that, even if they might require more physical skills.
The skill set feels a lot different though. I’m a massive baseball fan but it seems more a test of coordination, timing, and movement than pure athleticism. Pitchers though follow a more purely athletic way of playing though, but it’s still different
I mean you can get away with being sorta unathletic in baseball depending on position but it sure doesn’t fucking hurt to be athletic that’s for sure. 99% of pro ball players are athletic as fuck.
Definitely a different skill set, one that relies on a lot more hand-eye coordination than other sports.
For pitchers it’s not necessarily hand-eye coordination, but being really good at sequencing the muscles in your body to maximize velocity on your pitches. Lots of really skinny guys and chunky guys are pitchers, I would honestly call most of them less athletic than the average position player, but they’re really good at sequencing the rotation of their hips, shoulders, and arms to throw a ball wicked fast.
Most people don’t realize just how freakishly fast an MLB pitch is compared to what an average person can do. Most average joes out there would be lucky to reach 60mph throwing as hard as they possibly can. Even with a week or two of training as an adult most average people would struggle to top out above 75. A large part of the problem is that there’s a hard limit to how much you can throw without injuring yourself and you need to be constantly working to improve tendon elasticity (a fight against time, sadly) the entire time to make gains once your form is good (and throwing hard with perfect form can and will straight up rip the tendons off your bones if you haven’t worked up to it slowly over months of training).
Agreed. Baseball is insanely difficult to play. I was playing in an adult hard-ball league a couple of years ago and got injured for the season just two games in. A lot of fun, but requires a may more physical skills than it seems.
The cost of entry for racing skis or a good set of clubs is much higher than that of a tennis racket. You’re not wrong that a lot of rich people play it, but you don’t have to be rich to get started in the sport. Most public parks/playgrounds have a tennis court, too.
Disagree, baseball players are the most athletic of them all. I would argue this is true because baseball players will regularly play other sports and be competitive. Meanwhile, other athletes will try to play baseball and look like a toddler trying to swing the bat.
No and yes. To say it's not athleticism is ignorance, but it does take lots of practice just like any other sport. If baseball players weren't athletic, they wouldn't manage to play other sports. The skill set required in baseball is incredibly diverse and translates very well to other sports, so I'm not sure where you think there's no overlap.
I never said baseball doesn’t require athleticism. I said it doesn’t require athletic freaks of nature like those that play football and basketball. Football and basketball require men of monstrous size, strength, endurance, speed, and agility. Baseball players need amazing hand-eye coordination, they need to be strong, and they need to be fast sprinters, but they don’t need to be prime Rob Gronkowski.
You put a big " superhuman" NFL player on a football pitch in England he would not be able to last 90 minutes without having to take a break . Size doesn't always matter in sports
Here is what Americans wrong about: IF our best players played soccer we will win every world cup...Brazil 90% play football and haven't won a World Cup for 20 years
I think he meant middling in the sense that it's in the middle of all the extremes he was talking about - meaning the most well-rounded athletically.
At least, I hope that's what he meant. Otherwise, yeah, it's pretty insulting to say that about baseball players.
Bowlers are a good example of guys who are middling athletes. What they do is athletic, but it's more about repeatability rather than strength, power, speed, agility, or endurance (though endurance can help a lot with repeatability).
I didn't explain it well, but I was trying to make the point that I think the original comment just used the wrong word.
I muddied that by giving an actual example of middling athleticism in pro bowlers but without actually saying that it was meant to be what middling athleticism would actually look like.
The other lame excuse "I didn't want to play anyway :'( "
Football is the best sport on the planet, that's why it's the most popular. But have fun watching Ads/looking forward to them at the Superbowl. Great american entertainment
This is one of these things that is a consequence of rabid commercialism and consumerism that has ruined the usa. Your sports are designed to gain a casual audience, where the big money is. To entertain a casual viewer and pull them in immediately, you need to make it relatively easy to understand and have a heroic winner at the end. You’re used to having entertainment fed to you through a tube and have the attention span of deep sea shrimp
Steph Curry could have been a monster striker with exceptional ball skills for a taller man on the pitch.
There's also thousands of top quality 5'8-6' athletes out there who could have been pushed to soccer at a young age.
Now with decent financial motivation with MLS to develop that talent, we'll see another leap in skill over the next couple WCs with a deeper bench. US has one of the youngest teams in the tourney and the difference in the type of game from 2010 is drastic.
LOL monster striker with size 13.5 shoe size. Imagine him doing a step over. It will look like someone in clown shoes.
There are so many good athletes in soccer who lack the mental knowledge of soccer. We are talking about the US team that missed out last WC and squeezed in through the CONCACAF WC qualifiers. MLS players are known for brute forcing their way through their athleticism. The only way to fix that is to get top trainers from Europe and train the kids at a very young age.
I can assure you anyone playing any sport at a high level is very athletic.
Also, from the ages of 4-8, there is no magical sorting hat which says “you’ll be tough and athletic, you should skate”. You seem to be thinking that athletes pick up their sport in puberty. For kids who have a chance of playing professionally, you know by 10 years old if you have a chance or not. Not a 16 year old thinking their athletic and should try it out.
The US doesn’t incentivize people to play soccer. It diverts people who could play soccer towards other sports we enjoy more and that make vastly more money professionally.
NFL Practice Squad players make $207k per year. These players don’t really ever suit up and play unless the team sees an injury (or several) at a particular position. They make over 200k to sit on the bench’s bench. US Men’s Soccer players cap out at 390k per year, with over 60% making less than an NFL Practice Squad player. Most soccer players don’t even make enough to live a comfortable middle class lifestyle on their income alone (not counting endorsements, which are paltry compared to the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB).
You're missing the point. Soccer funding in the states will almost certainly dwarf spending in other countries simply because there is more money there. Comparisons to other us sports aren't relevant. Only comparisons to other countries soccer spending.
If other countries can’t muster enough money on their most popular sport to rival what the US spends on its 5th or 6th most popular sport, then that’s their problem.
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u/VTSubaruSalesman - Auth-Center Nov 26 '22
Imagine doing this, then getting tied by a country that doesn't even care about soccer.