Quote Originally Posted by RedTeamGo! View Post
Spain/England/Germany/Brazil/Argentina/Holland/France all have their best athletes playing soccer.

The best athletes from the United States are playing football, basketball and baseball.
Maybe, but when I look at the world's best soccer players, they usually don't have NFL or NBA bodies. As with every other sport, being big and fast helps but soccer has its own skill set. It's not athleticism we lack relative to the top countries, it's skill. Maybe a few of the NFL types would have developed it, who knows.

Quote Originally Posted by BuckeyeRed27 View Post
I think most American athletes do grow up playing soccer when they are young. Not all, but soccer is the most popular sport for kids under 12 in America. Now obviously at some point they stop, but I think the US issues with development have more to do with youth coaching than quantity of the number of kids playing soccer.
The coaching issue is a fair one, but I suspect the real issue is training, or lack thereof. A kid isn't going to be elite if he goes to practice and then doesn't touch a ball until the next practice. There aren't a lot of gym-rat kids in suburbia, which is where most youth soccer occurs.