Are men better soccer players than women?

Great Debates
81

Re: goalkeepers. I only play football in an amateur (women’s) team, but I have noticed that the bigger goalkeeper’s have a huge (npi) advantage over the smaller ones - they simply cover more of the goal area just by standing there. ‘Large size’ seems to be the defining factor there - of which height is one component. The smaller keepers have to be more skilled and athletic to cover the same area that a big goalkeeper can.

Thus a big goalkeeper with the same amount of skill and athleticism as a smaller player would therefore have the greatest advantage. And at professional levels, the large players would have the same amount of skill and athleticism as the smaller players - it’s only with amateurs that length of experience and amount of effort vary greatly.

Of course, the high-level professional goalkeepers tend to have enormous hands too, which is another area where men would have an advantage over women.

Skyfire - welcome to the SDMB, you have some interesting data there. But the problem is that at a professional level the male players would also have excellent teamwork skills and well-developed peripheral vision, while still retaining the advantages of strength and speed. In any sport that that requires you to run fast and kick hard, men will have an advantage.

That does of course still leave room for some exceptions. The general rule doesn’t apply to every single individual. The player Hannah Ljungberg may well be able to compete equally with the men (I’m afraid I don’t know enough about her to judge, though), but it doesn’t follow that a women’s team will.

I feel like such a traitor to my gender now!

82

Yikes, that sounds more difficult and dangerous than juggling chainsaws!

(Though probably not quite as dangerous as juggling light sabers.)

83

Hello there, SciFiSam.

Thank you for your graciousness.

I agree, and would not argue that a professional women’s team could beat a professional men’s team, barring some anomalous situation.

Speed and strength are very important, and women can’t get to that level of speed. Nor can they acquire the upper body strength, although they can achieve pound for pound parity in lower body strength.

Actually, I was hamhandedly trying to advance an opinion that soccer, whether performed by males or females, is a lovely game to watch because each gender brings their own style to the game, based on their own natural abilities.

Priceguy’s question was a good one and great for musing.

I do love to watch women’s soccer games, especially at the adolescent, non-professional level. To my eye it seems that females, once trained and conditioned, play quite elegantly, using a mixture of technical skills and strategical play, and some pretty fancy maneuvering. Contrast that with the drop, push, shove, run of adolescent male play, which is also fun to watch in its own right because of the snappy pace and relative primitiveness of it.

Does anyone recall the 1998 Men’s German World Cup team, when many of their core players were over 30, with some pushing 40? They were the oldest team in that World Cup, with an average age of just about 30.

Well, 30+ year old guys, while in excellent condition, hardly have the speed and strength of men in their 20s. Although I only got to see 2 of Germany’s games, the Germans played more slowly but with a lot of professionalism and sophistication. Although Germany wasn’t quite itself in this and the 1994 world cup for a host of reasons, they did win their group (and perhaps the quarterfinal, if i recall correctly), before they imploded. So there must be more to it than speed and strength.

In other words, if we remove gender from the equation, how much importance would speed and strength have in the conversation about a game that also requires other skills? 1998 Germany faced much younger teams in USA , Yugoslavia, and Mexico, so why didn’t these teams beat them? Ok, ok, I know the US team is not exactly the greatest competition, but Yugoslavia and Mexico are no slouches. Anyway, the other teams were speedier and probably physically stronger, yet it seemed that they were expending a great deal of energy and not getting very far against the “old” guys. :slight_smile:

And, no, you’re NOT a traitor to your own gender.

Good to meet you.

84

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been much discussion about the skill difference between men and women. Some posters have said that women can make up for the physical differences in other ways, but I believe that they’re lacking in those areas as well. I don’t know a single woman who can place a long pass like David Beckham, or who has the touch and dribbling prowess of Ronaldinho.

I don’t have a cite, but I remember watching a program on Discovery Health Channel in which some doctors claimed that men naturaly have better motor skills than women. They supported this by treating a woman with hormones and testing her motor skills before and after the treatment.

85

Tmagic77: what kinds of “hormones” did they treat the woman with in this experiment? Testosterone or similar anabolic steroids, I assume?
Even if testosterone does improve a woman’s motor skills, this doesn’t necessarily mean that her motor skills would’ve been better if she’d been born a man. Hormonal levels aren’t the only sex difference – there are apparently subtle differences in brain structure, e.g. that little thingy at the base of the corpus callosum that’s only present in females.

86

Hey Tmajic77, you are right. But don’t expect to bring reality to this discussion. All their swinging lives a lot of the kids here have been taught that there is no difference between the sexes.

Meanwhile today at Southern California University a study is released that conclusively proves that very early in pregnency hormones are introduced in-utero that direct a sexual dichotomy that is absolute; either a female mind, or a distintive male mind.

This is sad. An entire generation of our children have been brought up believing that the only difference between the sexes is penis envy and penis-in-fact.

Chicks can’t jump.

87

It was testosterone, and that was the only example they used during the show. Since the show was about sex change operations, they didn’t stay on that particular topic very long but I thought that they very fairly obvious in suggesting that there was much more evidence to support men are better at physical activities. I know that’s not very concrete, but it’s better than nothing.

88

It was testosterone, and that was the only example they used during the show. Since the show was about sex change operations, they didn’t stay on that particular topic very long but I thought that they very fairly obvious in suggesting that there was much more evidence to support men are better at physical activities. I know that’s not very concrete, but it’s better than nothing.

89

QUOTE]*Originally posted by nicky *
**Apoptosis, goalkeeping is a mixture of reach and agility.

And the optimum mix of these attributes is most common around approx. 6’ to 6’4".

In the far-off gender neutral future, there would be women playing at the highest level in mixed teams. But I think they would be a minority, and it would also depend on position. There might be quite a few female left-wingers, but very very few female goalkeepers. **
[/QUOTE]

I would think a tall, thin (lightweight) person would work best because acceleration is a function of power and mass. The ability to move from one side of the goal to the other is easier when you are not trying to move a lot of weight.

However, in the real world, the best goal keeper I knew was built like a tank and could take a scissor-kick to the stomach and remain standing.

And I agree that there is still a skill gap between men’s and women’s teams. Doesn’t stop me from watching the lasses play. Football, by any other name…