Whatever else you can say about football players you cannot say that they are not superb athletes. The “weak, fat, diseased, obese” players can lift hundreds of pounds all day long, can run 40-yard sprints in the 4.5-5 second range, and can stand off against athletes of equal or greater size 50+ times a week.
They are very specialized athletes. Then again, all athletes are specialized. Cristiano Ronaldo would be killed if he played football, but on a soccer pitch (yes, pitch) he would run circles around NFL players. His ability to run the required pace all day while completely controlling a ball with his feet would convey him no advantage whatsoever. American football is long stretches of setup followed by 5-10 seconds of vicious, exceedingly fast violence, not occasional sprints to break the monotony of jogging for 90 minutes. NFL players would be sucking wind within 10 minutes.
The size of NFL players is a function of the necessity to act as blockers. Wide receivers, who do little blocking, are tall, thin and blindingly fast. But even the slowest person on that field would smoke you and 98% of the world’s population, simply because they are the elite, pick-of-the-litter one-tenth-of-one-percenters that make it to the professional level. The ones that can’t run 5-second 40s while weighing 350 pounds are left behind. You could therefore say that in a sense natural selection has in fact taken place.
Athleticism is Americans’ main asset in soccer, too. Whoever is their physical trainer, he does a hell of a job in pumping them. They’re faster and stronger than you’d usually expect in average players. In fact, this and Tim Howard was the only thing keeping them alive against Belgium. As soon as their energies depleted nearing extra-time, the defense snapped and all its poor tactics and technical qualities became apparent. Had Belgium been Colombia, Howard’s prowess would have been useless.
Soccer is so good because it allows practically any kind of body type to play. Usually the basic requirements are 120 minutes of endurance and sufficient ball control. See Barcelona and Real Madrid for example: one mostly takes shorter guys with a lower barycenter; the other chooses tall, slim and lean “tower” shapes. Or compare Germany’s former striker, Miroslav Klose, to Argentina’s, Higuain, and to old Italy’s Roberto Baggio.
The stereotype goes that only extremely tall players with long arms can play NBA: true or false?
I’m not sure that this is true, especially when compared to NFL football. The standard deviation of weight on the Seattle Seahawks roster is about 45 lbs, as compared to 10 lbs and 15 lbs on the Real Madrid and Barcelona rosters, respectively. Combining the two rosters results in a standard deviation of 13 lbs. NFL players are bigger overall, but there looks to be more size differences in American footbal than there are in soccer.
Sports scholarships, courses tailored to let them pass so they can keep playing, sometimes shadier programs will lead to professors being pressured into going easy on grading star players, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some genuinely smart players out there, there are some that make the most of the athletic scholarship to get an education so they’re set up for their life post sportsball, but there is a lot of bullcrapping involved in college sports, and sometimes you do get NFL players who can barely read despite having gone through college.
You forgot to control for positions. The high standard deviation just shows that linesmen have a completely different physique than wide receivers.
What’s more interesting is how soccer players in the same position can have completely different physiques. Here’s an extreme example: Phillip Lahm and Jerome Boateng are two of the very best defenders in the world, playing for the same club (Bayern München) and the same national side (Germany). But Jerome Boateng is about ten inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Phillip Lahm. (ETA: here’s a picture showing the two. The difference is crazy.)
I’m revisiting this question because it might be one of the hardest thing to explain to non-Americans, but I can’t emphasize how important it is to fans that a team is in the top league for its sport.
The Chicago Cubs is a team in Chicago that has been located in that city since 1870, one of the few teams that has been in continuous existence for more than a century without ever relocating or having been suspended or changed leagues.
The team’s identity has many factors. It has been called the “Chicago Cubs” since 1907 (before that it was called the Chicago White Stockings, a name that was later swiped by another prominent Chicago team). Its team colors are royal blue and red (since the 1920s). Its team insignia has featured a C encircling a bear or the word “Cubs” since 1908. It has played in Wrigley Field since 1914. And so on and so on and so on.
And also, it has been a major league team ever since the major leagues were invented in 1876. This element is a crucial part of its identity. Every year for the last 140 years, the Chicago Cubs have been a major league team. No matter how bad they might have been—decades-long stretches of pathetic play and futility—the Cubs were there, in the National League, playing 156 (162) games a year against their rivals the St. Louis Cardinals and all the other major league teams.
No matter how bad the Cubs might have been, that fact, that they have always been a major league team, is an essential element of the club’s identity. If you institute relegation and drop the Cubs (for being basement-dwellers for X number of years, or whatever standard you choose), you will essentially have taken away the Cubs from the Cubs’ fans.
The MLB will be rejected by the Cubs’ fans. The Cubs won’t play the Cardinals or any of the other teams they have played for more than a century, they won’t sell tickets, no one will watch them on TV. It will be over. Dead. The Cubs will never make enough money to be able to be promoted back to the majors. The MLB will have lost forever one of the most lucrative and loyal and wealthy fan bases in the country.
You just can’t do that in American professional sports.
Nitpick: they don’t really play the same position. Boateng is a center back and Lahm is a fullback (or, more recently, defensive midfielder). Boateng can and has played fullback in an emergency, but Lahm cannot play center back. He’s simply too small. Pep Guardiola has put him in a lot of different roles during his tenure, but I can guarantee he will never be played at CB.
One of Germany’s weak points in this World Cup was that they were using players who were center backs by trade as fullbacks, because Germany is short of quality fullbacks (even worse now that Lahm has retired). It made the back line very slow and uncreative.
Additionally, who do you replace them with? The St. Paul Saints? They’ll be slaughtered, lucky to get double digit wins. The talent difference between the major league teams and minor league teams is huge.
As kidchameleon said, the difference in positions is the point. Different positions lend themselves to very different body types, probably more-so in American football than soccer.
Controlling for position might give interesting insights, but it opens up the problem: what constitutes a position? The links I gave show 4 soccer positions (Goalkeeper, defender, midfielder, forward) vs. 17 NFL positions. Basing the calculation off that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the soccer positions showed more variability. But if we look at a more nuanced listing of positions like chizzuk does, the results may flip again in favor of the NFL.
But it’s not the same thing. American football requires one of a few pretty specific physiques. That’s very different from allowing people with a wide variety of physiques to excel.
The NFL has guys who are anywhere from over 6’8" to under 5’8", from 350 lbs to less than 200lbs. All sorts of sizes and shapes play in the league but somehow soccer allows more body types to thrive in that sport despite having less variation of heights and weights?
Um … that’s in no way unusual. Referring to the home fans as the twelfth man is very common in soccer. Hell, the wiki page for it has loads of examples of teams that have retired the number 12 shirt so as to officially designate the fans as the twelfth man:
Even adjusting for position, in the NFL, you can find some big differences. At receiver, for example, you’ve got 6’5", 236 lb Calvin Johnson and 5’9" 185 lb Wes Welker. At running back, you could compare 5’8" 200 lb Danny Woodhead with 6’4" 265 lb Brandon Jacobs. Those are pretty close to the same differences between the two soccer players straight man cited. And add on top of that the difference between positions…
Yeah, but he does have the grandfather story. In England is there not an exception for a “family team”? As in, something like I don’t like near Liverpool, but my father and grandfather are huge fans and at one time lived there.
I’d say that a Grandparent is pushing it, but there’s no solid rule. It isn’t like it is written down, there are always exceptions. However, he also said that not following your local team is “normality”. In the UK it is a long, long way from normality.
Someone else mentioned changing allegiances so that you can support along with a child (or something). Again, a huge no-no. You can also follow another club for various reasons, but the club your number one club is for life. No exceptions there.
My loyalty when I was growing up was to the Oakland Raiders. When they moved to Los Angeles, I dropped them, and picked up the San Francisco 49ers. It doesn’t matter that the Raiders have moved back to Oakland (at least for now), they will never be my team again. They broke my heart.
