I've always thought about this. What if guys like Kobe and Randy Moss and Chris Johnson played the beautiful game? We have no way of knowing if any of these guys would have good dribbling skills, crossing ability, etc. but there is no way any country has better athletes.
x3983640396840396833 our best athletes would still suck and our team would be only marginally better than they are now
Didn't know that this was debated here before, but not surprised it has been. Didn't mean to open a I would agree with both. Having better athletes would make a difference, but with shit coaches it probably wouldn't make as much of a difference as you'd think. I hadn't really thought about the coaching aspect before. It's a very good point and exposes a big flaw in my original thought on the topic.
If you think just having better athletes would make us immediately better then look at the African teams.
Senegal did not make a semi. No African team has reached that far. Africa had 5 teams in the World Cup at their continent and only one advanced passed the first round and should have lost immediately if not for Bradley's stupidity.
I do hate the basketball/football/baseball players would be better soccer players argument so much though The amount of times I've heard the sentence "Tim Tebow would beast as a centerback" in Gainesville made me wanna vomit Clearly he is a leader and would be better off as a CDMand now i wait
That trick doesn't really work unless you make the font just big enough to be able to tell its not just periods at the end of a sentence
Just being an athlete doesn't mean shit. Yeah, they're big, fast and tall, but there is no way of knowing how that translates to soccer. Plus, the coaching in the US is garbage so they likely would have massive technical deficiencies. FWIW, I've heard Steve Nash talk about soccer a few times and got the impression that he would probably play that instead of hoops if he was good enough. He basically insinuated it in this article... http://www.nba.com/features/gq_nash_051202.html
The whole "Best Athletes" argument is a tad ridiculous. We are already more athletically talented than most International teams out there. What people really mean is that if all of our athletes played soccer, we would be substantially better. It's a numbers game imo. The good news is, we have a big enough country and enough cash to be at least near the top without it being our #1 sport.