Greatest footballer ever?

[JoeU]

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Many (most?) of the players who make the top pro levels in the US played all of these sports at one time or another, they chose what to specialize in based on earning potential, nothing more.

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The decathalon requires more athletic ability than any of the sports mentioned - do you think our decathaletes are therefore our best athletes? That would be an absurd assumption.

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I agree that most athletes will go where the money is. I just think that many of our better athletes do play soccer. Not all American soccer players play here. For example, Landon Donovan played yesterday in the Champions League for Bayern Leverkusen (sp?), and DeMarcus Beasley scored a goal yesterday for PSV Eindhoven. Also, the three national team goalies all play in Europe. I say they are the better athletes because they don't get the coaching many of the European players get when they are young, but they still manage to compete at the highest level of world soccer. They are competing on athletic ability and inborn talent. Think of how much better they would be if they were living in Europe. They're talent and athletic ability is what they are getting by on. They're also making some pretty good coin over there too. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

As for the decathlete argument, I found this definition of athlete froom the Oxford dictionary and thought it was interesting:

<font color="blue"> athlete

• noun 1 a person who is good at sports. 2 a person who competes in track and field events.

— ORIGIN Greek athletes, from athlon ‘prize’.
</font>

Joe

[tolbiny]

"Care to elaborate? Athletic ability to a large extent transfers between sports. Our most coordinated, fastest and strongest athletes almost never play soccer. They play football, basketball and baseball. We'd dominate soccer if anyone here cared about it. "

LOL
Baseball for one is becoming more and more dominated by non US players. A great deal of the superstars, as well as regular players are now from central and south america.
Football and Basketball are played only sparingly in any countries other than the US- and only in the past 20 years in those countries it is. To state that we "dominate" those sports is like saying that a lacross player who dominates in a sport that hardly anyone plays is worthless. Percentage of the worlds population that ever picks up an american football or basketball is pretty small when compared to the number of people who kick a european football around.

[jdl22]

This reply is to noone in particular.

I think one thing not mentioned that makes the US less competitive is the college system. It's changed in the last few years but up until then the top US talent would end up going to college. This seems ok on the face of it but consider the difference in talent that somebody like Michael Owen (to give a famous example many Americans are familiar with) faced when he was playing for Liverpool against the top players in the Premiership at age 19 versus some American that went to college and played for four years against people more than 90% of whom aren't good enough and will never be to play for a second or third flight team in Europe.

I think in sports like American football the college system is a huge help. In that sport developing your body is key though and high school players simply couldn't play against the pros with a few very rare exceptions. People used to think it was good for the NBA but look at how quickly players like Lebron and Amare Stoudemire have developed into top players in the league. If they'd played for four years of college I doubt they would be nearly as good.

As for the US being top 10 that seems ridiculous. I would put us behind any of these countries (listed in no particular order and I'm surely leaving off a few countries that should be favored to beat the US in a match):

Europe:
England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic

South America:
Brasil, Argentina

I think the above wouldn't be particularly close. I think we would also be slight dogs against Ireland, Mexico, Uruguay, Sweden, and a few top African sides. It would also be a bit worse if it were a home and away two legged match because of the bigger home field advantage that these countries would have.

[cockandbull]

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less than half of them would answer Pele.



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Correct, but just because the other half would answer Ronaldo...

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i'd guess pele would get 50% of the votes, the rest wouldn't go to ronaldo. Read about garrincha...