For example: in the US, we have the All star team in baseball and the Pro bowl in football which takes the top players of each league and they compete against each other. But i’m not convinced the Pro Bowl team could win against the Super Bowl champions or the All Star team could defeat the World Series champ in a best of 7.
Lack of team cohesion and all that.
Does this problem ever get brought up in soccer?
You do sometimes get matches where a “World XI” will compete against a domestic or national team but they are exhibitions so aren’t so keenly contested.
It would be difficult to prove but prevailing opinion is that the best domestic teams would beat the best national teams. Teams like Man U, Chelsea, Barcelona and Real Madrid spend a fortune to buy the best players from the four corners of the world and so inevitably end up with better squads than a team picked from a single country. Combine this with the fact that domestic teams train together far more than any national side could hope for and things begin to weigh heavily in favour of the domestic teams.
The last time I heard the subject broached on a podcast amongst football journalists they agreed that the best international teams would probably sit around mid-table in the English Premier League, they would be very good teams but could not compete with the squads of top internationals fielded by domestic teams.
It’s hard to say because matches between national and local teams are rarely played, but I don’t think that any national team could compete with teams like Real Madrid or FC Chelsea (or any other European top team).
The pool of players of the European top teams consists of the best players from all around the world, who each are stars in their own national team. And the local teams have the advantage of playing and training the whole season as a team, whereas the national teams are recruited only for short periods. I think there is no national team which has a cadre of world class players for every position, like the mentioned top local teams.
ETA: Beaten by charlie145, who basically said the same.
Imho, this is the reason the US has been horrible in international basketball for so long. Pre-Dream Team, the US national team met around February and trained for 4-6 months before the Olympics. However, after the pro’s started, the coaches and many of the main players wouldn’t be able to join the team until April or May (this year, June) as they were deep into the regular NBA playoffs. The national team now barely has 2 months to practice together. Compare this to 1988, the last national team made of college players. They won the bronze, and it was considered a huge disappointment. But, the national teams they played against were stocked with current and future NBA stars, like Vlade Divac, Tony Kukoc, Arvydas Sabonis, etc. Consider that a team made of college stars came in third against teams made of NBA players, with only 4 months of practice.
[hijack]How does a Brit pronounce the team name “Real Madrid?” As a Spanish word, “Real” would be said something like REE-al, but as an English word it’d be “REEL”.
Heck, for that matter, how does an American pronounce it? I’ve only ever seen the name written.
[/hijack]
I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud but internally I say it halfway in between - not “reel” nor “rey-ahl” but more like “ree-uhl”.
Rey-Al Madrid
Muchas.
If you are interested in the Spanish pronunciation, you could go to the Real Madrid website, español section, and listen to a video (link). For example, listen to “El estilo de José Mourinho”, the guy with the necktie. About 25 seconds in you can hear “Real Madrid” pronounced a few times.
This isn’t true really. I think most people here in Europe would agree the top international sides could comfortably compete with the top domestic European sides. The Spain side at the moment is world class across the board, and the Argentina, Brazil and England sides could readily compete at the same level as the likes of Real Madrid and Chelsea.
The bottom line is I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference between them: I think most people here would probably agree that Barcelona are currently the best team in either domestic or international football, but the Spain, Brazil and Argentina sides would be right up there, as would other domestic clubs like Chelsea, Inter Milan or Real Madrid (whose name is indeed pronounced “Ray-al Madrid” here in England, often shortened to either “Real” or “Madrid”, despite the fact Atletico Madrid are another top club from the same city…).
I saw a poll in a newspaper recently about what was the best team in the world, and I remember it was Barcelona followed by Spain, but I can’t find it now. This poll by the Daily Mail presented their greatest 10 teams of all time, and while it’s very England-biased and while the Daily Mail is a mediocre source at the best of times, you can see they think that the top international teams have been competing at the same level as the top domestic sides for decades now (their number 1 is the Brazil team from 1970, and the most recent entry is the Spain side from 2008 at number 10. If they’d published it a year later the current Barcelona side might have made it).
It’s similar to how the American would pronounce the team name “Real Salt Lake.” Well, the first part is.
[moderating]
Another World-Cup inspired thread moved from General Questions to The Game Room.
[/moderating]
The current Spanish side is probably closest to a top domestic team but teams like Brazil, Argentina and England have some great players but are weak in other areas. A top domestic side has strength across the board as well as strength in depth. As much as I love England I have to admit that man for man they are weaker than most of the top domestic sides.
International teams have the superstars but they also have the guys who ‘make up the numbers’, domestic sides aren’t so limited and can have top class players in every position. I have heard the subject discussed by the media many times and the result is always the same, domestic teams are stronger than international.
You can’t really compare teams across the ages and there is a lot of romanticism involved in it, people remember the teams of their youth with rose-tinted glasses. Comparing old teams with current teams is even more difficult than comparing domestic and international but one thing I would be sure of is that the modern teams would be significantly fitter than the teams of yesteryear. I would imagine that modern Premiership team would leave a 1970s team gasping for air by the end of the first half, football today is played at a much higher tempo than in the past and I would imagine it would tip the balance strongly in their favour.
It depends a lot on the sport, I’m sure. I think an all star baseball team would easily beat a championship team. An All-star American (i.e., US or Canadian) football team probably would do much less well without a lot of practice together.
Baseball is a team sport which is composed of many separate one-on-one duels of the batter vs the pitcher. Defense is largely individual as well. Probably the most important “practice” aspect is the catcher and pitcher knowing each others’ thinking.
In American football, the team aspect is much more important. And in all star games, they often have (or used to) some restrictions on what you can do like blitzing.
I’d think hockey and basketball are in between these in importance of practicing together. So an all star team of those would probably do better against a champion than in American football and worse than in baseball. Those sports don’t have set plays but you do need to know what your teammates are doing and playing experience helps. In the hockey All-Star game, they usually try to have teammates on the same line even if those teammates don’t regularly play on the same line with their own team.
Now I’m speculating more, I’d think cricket would be like baseball and perhaps even more so as I don’t think there is pitcher catcher interaction with the latter calling for particular types of bowls. Soccer (non-American football) is probably about like hockey. I’d guess it’s a bit more individual than hockey so the All star team would do a bit better. In rugby, I’d guess practicing as a team is more important than in any sport above save American football.
The Canadian men’s National Hockey Team would absolutely wipe the floor with any NHL team. National teams for many other nations would have similar results. Sweden, Finland, the US and the Czech Republic would all do very well. Russia would likely dominate. By international standards they’re a bit thin on defence but only a handful of NHL teams could hope to have a blue line that would match up, and no NHL team could come close to matching up to Russia’s ridiculous talent at forward. Even Slovakia would make a good showing, especially if Halak were to keep up his torrid play.
The main differences between hockey and soccer that make national teams so much stronger in hockey are the fact that way fewer countries play hockey, so the talent base isn’t fragmented as much when choosing national teams(Canada alone provides about 50% of all players in the NHL) and the NHL’s salary cap has really spread the talent evenly around the league, so there’s no teams like Barcelona or Man U who outspend everybody else and gather a collection of stars.
I know it’s a little bit unfair at the moment, but how do you resolve the continuous English keeper problem? By paying 30 million euros for a decent foreign keeper to be willing to naturalize?
This may sound a little snarky, but this is the main problem for national teams. You have to take what you have.
Imho, this can only be done when the physical ability of the national team is far better than other teams, e.g. Dream Team 1. On the other hand, when the other teams match up well in terms of physical ability, then teamwork is the main factor (e.g. Argentina’s national team led by Manu Ginobli.)
For example, let’s split the Canadian national hockey team into two separate teams by random draw. The team who played together longer should have a big advantage over those that don’t.
It’s a hypothetical question that is hard to answer - as mentioned, international sides don’t have the benefit of regular training to shape the team and they can’t sign players to fill areas of weakness. A few years back we had some shocking teams contest international tournaments - Greece winning Euro 2004, South Korea getting to the semis of WC 02 - made international football look really weak. OTOH, is anyone seriously arguing that today’s Spain team wouldn’t clean house, if you inserted them into the prem and gave the all season to play together?
Another side to it is that the type of football that gets played in international tournaments is completely different to domestic leagues. Knockout competitions engender a cautious, possession-orientated game that often produces shite matches - the WC is a fantastic spectacle but it certainly produces a lot of garbage football. So it’s hard to compare the plethora of 1-1 draws between decent international sides with the exciting games you see in the top leagues.
In general, the best club teams are better than the best national teams. However, if the national teams got to play together more often then I think for sure Spain and Brazil would be up there with Inter, Barca, Manchester United, whoever. Club teams go a lot deeper though. Currently only a handful of national teams are truly great, there are probably a dozen club sides as good as the 3rd or 4th best national team.