An Open Letter on the Best Athletes Argument
/By Paul Harvey
Who is Austin Matthews? He looks ill.
For the first time in eight and a half years, the US Men’s National Team played in the final round of the FIFA Men’s World Cup. We all expected what came next; after all, it happens every time the USMNT plays a high profile game in front of people who are relatively new to watching the sport:
Yes, that timeless question — “What if the best athletes in the USA played soccer?”
If you have ever asked this question, then this article is for you!
Fair warning, some of this discussion is going to be theoretical, even nerdy, dealing with things like selection pressure, tails of distributions and more. In an effort to be culturally competent, I will try to make sure this is accessible to people with the attention span that is typically encouraged by more popular American sports. Don’t want to lose anybody!
Motte & Bailey:
Motte & Bailey? No, it’s not a law firm, a leading receiver tandem in the NFL, or a pick and roll combo — rather, it’s an arguing technique designed to prop up a bad argument by attaching it to a universally accepted one that the arguer can retreat to and defeat any counterargument. For the “best athletes” argument, this is the “motte”, or safe position:
“If the USA put its significant population and sporting infrastructure more fully behind the sport of soccer, they would make significant gains as a national team”
Does that sound right? Of course it does. This is pretty much universally accepted, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that argues that one of the most populous countries in the world with a well developed grassroots sports system would not improve via greater participation.
If you are arguing this, congratulations on being right, I guess. Please stop, you’re wasting your time and everyone else’s.
Of course, the whole point of the safe argument is to provide cover for the “bailey”, in this case:
“The USA is only bad at soccer because our population as a whole doesn’t care, and if it did our superior American athletes in these other, unrelated, sports would dominate the entire world. [Insert popular American athlete here] would be the best player of all time due to his [insert thing that makes him good at unrelated sport]”
That’s the argument we’ll be dealing with here. If you feel like LeBron James or Tyreek Hill (or whoever it is that currently best represents the stereotype of “American super athlete”) would be an amazing, transcendent soccer player — this is to explain why that isn’t the case.
Yeah, even you, Barry.
The “Why” of the Argument:
If you’ve made it this far you’re willing to engage in the discussion. Good for you! This next part might hurt a bit. Stick with it (and understand I’m an American too, so it’s coming from a place of love).
Why does this exact argument come up every time the USA plays soccer at a high level? It’s simple.
Americans get their feelings hurt. We don’t like losing. We really don’t like not being the best at something (even though in almost every sport another part of the world takes just as seriously, we aren’t the best). Believing LeBron James or Tyreek Hill would be the world’s best soccer player if they tried is comforting to our wounded pride. We just want to feel special!
If you’re reading this to understand, put aside those feelings for a second. The USA being just ok at soccer does not reflect on you, or the American spirit, or whatever. It’s fine. If you want us to be better at soccer (and believe me, I want us to be better at soccer) you have to understand why it is the way it is.
The Soccer Athlete vs the Great American Athlete:
What is especially maddening to the casual USA soccer watcher is just how normal everyone looks. The best player in history, Lionel Messi, is charitably listed at 5’7” and 148 lbs. When you run into a professional basketball player or football player, they stand out — literally. Despite Messi being the greatest ever in the most popular sport in the world, nothing about his appearance would indicate that he is remotely special.
What makes someone an elite athlete, though?
Whatever it takes for their specific sport.
Can you guess which one is Kipchoge?
It doesn’t take much to see the difference in physiology between an NFL offensive lineman, and marathon world record holder Eliud Kipchoge.
So who is the better athlete?
It depends on what you ask them to do.
Andre Smith, pictured above, would be unlikely to finish a marathon, and certainly not in a time that would be considered competitive. Similarly, if you asked Kipchoge to protect a QB from Aaron Donald, the result would probably require a spatula to remove him from the field.
Sports are in many ways the purest form of meritocracy that has ever existed. There is constant competitive pressure, and the very best and most important attributes are easily identifiable at the top level. Put simply, selective pressure is why marathon runners don’t look like offensive lineman.
Traore, who famously doesn’t lift weights because he doesn’t want to be “too big.”
I don’t think it’s a leap to say that soccer, played by hundreds of millions of people — more than any other sport in the world — and using billions of dollars in resources to identify talent worldwide, has sufficient selection pressure to select for the best possible soccer players. Just increasing the pool a few million doesn’t seem likely to change the outcomes. That means that if it took a player with Tyreek Hill’s abilities to be a great soccer player, we’d see guys with Tyreek Hill’s abilities. Instead, the closest we get is Adama Traore, a middling winger for a middling Premier League team.
So why doesn’t soccer seem to select for any specific physical attributes? Why is the distribution of soccer players so close to the distribution of average, everyday people?
A Tale of Tails:
Alright, this is where we get really in the statistical weeds. Let’s talk about populations and probabilities. Pretty much any characteristic that can be ascribed to human beings is normally distributed — there’s a median, where half are above and half below. Then you have standard deviations, which are statistically significant differences. In a standard normal distribution, 95% percent of people fall within two standard deviations of the mean. Outside of that are the “tails”; the exceptionally small groups of outliers. Ability to play soccer (however you measure it) is probably normally distributed, and the world class players are on the tails of the tails.
The thing is soccer ability has multiple components and at a certain point the tails come apart. I encourage you to read the linked article, because it deals with why exactly NBA players are so tall (6’7” on average) but most very tall people are not professional basketball players.
An example of a twisted pear correlation, where at the top level A and C have no correlation
Up to a certain point, athleticism is extremely helpful being good at soccer. Being big, fast, or strong helps you outplay those who aren’t. If you’ve ever watched a youth soccer game, this is easy to understand. Once you hit a certain level, though, that is no longer an advantage and other things take control. This leads to a “twisted pear” correlation where at the extreme tails of soccer ability — the top players in the world — there is no correlation between athleticism and performance.
Let’s coin a term here: Minimum Required Athletic Potential, or MRAP. Basically, what is the minimum inherent athletic ability to be a high level player in the sport. For basketball, already you have to be taller than 99% of the world’s population just to be of average height in the NBA. Then, you have to be able to jump high enough to get your hands entirely above a 10’ rim. The ability to run and jump explosively can make up for height up to an extent, but either way you’re in the 99.9th percentile of human beings. That’s the MRAP for basketball.
No, not this thing.
In football, it’s much more position dependent. To be a starting quality left tackle, protecting a QB’s blindside? Well, first you have to be bigger than all but the tiniest fraction of human beings. Then you have to be quick on top of that, and with a body that can handle the physical strain of all the weight and explosiveness. In terms of MRAP, it might be the most exclusive job in the world of sports.
The reason these MRAPs are so high is that because sports are adversarial — if an opponent has an edge, then the requirements increase to match that. To defend Kevin Durant, you need to be tall, quick, and strong. To get past Ronnie Stanley, you need to be 295 pounds of pure explosive muscle and mass.
You think this guy is going to survive running through the A gap? He definitely can’t dunk.
What about soccer? It‘s obvious that the MRAP is much lower. In general soccer players are fast, but not Olympic sprinter fast or even NFL WR or RB fast. They aren’t on average particularly tall or muscular. They do have to cover a lot of ground, but usually just about 10 km over 90 minutes. A fairly average runner can do a 10K in half that time. That’s not to discount the athleticism of great players, as they can do remarkable things; it’s just that speed and strength can only give so much of an edge at the extremes of competition. As a player uses more of their strength or speed, it becomes exponentially harder to do anything useful with the ball and they become, paradoxically, easier to defend. For the most part any player that meets the MRAP in football, basketball, or baseball would easily clear it for soccer (with exceptions for the ones who are just too big or too tall — there are almost no outfield players above 6'5"), but the same is definitely not true going the other way.
This isn’t due to a lack of athletes being available in soccer, a common implication of the “best athletes” argument. If you look at youth teams across the world, you will see kids who would traditionally be considered elite athletes playing soccer. A lot of noise is made in the USA about making sure strong and fast kids don’t just out-athlete their competition (and in so doing never develop as players), but countries like Brazil or France have no qualms about encouraging big fast kids to play to their strengths. They let the adversarial process play out, throw on 6’3” behemoths to go up against 5’3” midfielders, and let the best soccer player win. While there’s no shortage of great athletes in their youth ranks, if you look at their national teams (the very best players they have), they look physically about the same as most teams. There’s a filter in place that sheer athleticism alone just can’t beat.
The final conclusion of all of this is pretty simple. Remember the “bailey” argument about increased participation leading to a better national team? It’s absolutely true, but with one major caveat. The USMNT would still look about the same as it does now; the players would just be better at soccer.
We’re almost at the end — if you’re tired, I don’t blame you. We’re entering the 4th quarter so here’s a dramatic video with black and white, jump cuts, and a bald guy yelling at you — I hear that’s what gets y’all pumped up.
It’s All about the Ball:
So if it isn’t the things we traditionally define as athleticism in the big three sports — size, speed, and athleticism — what is it exactly that define who does and does not become an elite player?
It’s ball skills. Technique, creativity, vision, and understanding of the game. Those last three probably can be developed in other sports and brought over, but the technical side of the game just can’t be. It’s the most important factor by far in separating the best from the rest. Every time you see a soccer player who looks like just an ordinary guy run out on the field, understand that his ability with the ball is far, far above his peers.
Christian Pulisic is a great example. The USA’s best player, he is widely regarded as a good but not elite dribbler. He makes up for any tactical or technical deficiencies with his work rate and athleticism, but his technical ability puts a hard ceiling on just how good he can be.
Here he is at 9 years old (mute for this, trust me):
Pulisic was a unicorn in American soccer development, who compared to his peers was light years ahead in technical ability. In fact, he was probably the most technically gifted player on the field every time out until his move to Borussia Dortmund as a teenager. Despite being an extreme outlier by American standards, in the end it wasn’t enough to take him to the upper echelons of the sport, and probably won’t be.
Technical talent, like most things, is unevenly distributed among a population. Not all players will develop at the same rates, and you can put in the same time and effort into practice and get wildly varying results. A lot of this is inherent — it can only be improved up to a point. At a population level, it will always be the outliers that make it to the elite levels. In soccer, there’s no clear relationship between outlier level ball skill and elite athleticism. Because the skill is more important, those are the ones who make it to the top. It’s exceptionally rare to be one with both — to have “just” 1 in 1000 athleticism probably would means you’re not making it in the NFL or NBA. And to combine that with 1 in 1000 ball skill means there are just about 300 players like you in the entire country. To be a 99.99% outlier on both tails? There probably isn’t anyone in the entire world with that kind of potential.
Still, because the USA has such a large soccer playing population (roughly 4.5 million kids play soccer every year), shouldn’t we have more of those technical outliers? Why is Croatia, a country with 3.9 million people total, so much better than us?
The Three C’s:
In the end, our potential as a soccer nation comes down to 3 things. Culture, competition, and coaching. Culture is the groundwater. Kids in the USA grow up dreaming about winning the Super Bowl or being the MVP of the NBA. Dads gathering around the grill talk about the latest moves in the NFL or baseball and how it affects their fantasy football team. Without soccer reaching that kind of cultural penetration, it will be difficult to get kids involved and keep them involved.
Still, 4.5 million kids playing soccer is a colossal number. Why aren’t they any good on a global scale? It’s all about the coaching. First off, I’m not talking about the thousands of professionals committed to the sport and working with kids. It’s the parents who start them off young, the volunteers, and the middle and high school coaches. Can you imagine a High School football coach that’s never played football, and only watches it 4 times a year? Of course not. Yet for many middle school and even high school players, that’s their reality. They aren’t set up for success. They’re not getting high quality technical coaching from a young age. Pulisic had a former pro for a parent, what chance does a normal kid stand?
The final piece is competition. If you drop in on any elementary school recess in America, you will see kids shooting a basketball, playing horse, even 5 on 5 if they can get the numbers. In every park with a basketball hoop, players young and old get together and play pickup. In the rest of the world it’s the same — but switch basketball for soccer. The only way to get good at soccer is to play all the time.
Maybe One Day:
The USA has made huge strides in soccer in the past decade, professionalizing the experience with academies and starting to reach kids earlier and earlier. Those gains have been reflected in the youngest team in the World Cup. 2026 could be a real inflection point that allows soccer a bigger place in the sporting order, but even if it does — there’s a lot of work to be done.
I love soccer — it’s the only sport that anyone can play at a high level. It doesn’t matter if you’re tall, strong, big, or fast. You just have to love the ball. If you play enough, the game loves you back. And while at times it may be exceptionally cruel (just ask Germany) over a long enough time frame your commitment will bring success (just ask Germany). If we build the infrastructure, the talent will come.
Until then, let’s retire the bad Sportscenter photoshops, ok?