Spens1 wrote:Oscar9992 wrote:I am sure USA, Canada or Russia will never produce players caliebers of today's Ronaldo & Messi. Not even players close to their level.
Maybe not Ronaldo level but Pulisic could go onto become a top 5-10 player in the world easily (probably once he makes his inevitable move to Bayern, as is Bundesliga tradition).
LOL. Christian Pulisic is good, but "top 5-10 player easily" is ridiculous.
Yes, he might become top 5-10 some day.
But that's a very, very high bar to cross, and he's still pretty far away from there. There are always quite a few young players who look promising, but only very few of those ever get to become top 5 or top 10 players. A lot of things have to work out perfectly for that to be the case, having the right coaches, playing at the right club, getting in the right situations, staying injury free and motivated etc. etc.
And for most of those talents, it never happens, they just stay good players.
There have been many players who at some point early in their careers have done much greater things than Pulisic has but never became "top 5-10". Just to name a few players from Pulisic's own club: Rosicky, Sahin, Goetze, Kagawa, Lewandowski, Reus, Dembele - they all looked very compelling early in their careers, many of them have achieved things early in their careers that Pulisic still only dreams of, some of them had pretty good careers yet still, none of them reached "top 5-10" status (Dembele still might get there some day, but the last year was at least a bit sobering).
And this kind of attitude is the problem with the whole thread. Everybody who claims "US would be #1 easily" needs to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
The "gene pool" argument is rather nonsensical, as there are plenty of "soccer countries" with plenty of genetic diversity, migration is happening in a lot of places, the US is not really unique in this respect. There are a lot of places where soccer is the #1 sport, a lot of those places have decent to very good scouting networks, training facilities, youth academies, good leagues and very good clubs.
Even countries like Brazil don't dominate all the time and can lose a game badly and can be sent home 7:1 on a bad day. Even countries like Italy or the Netherlands don't even make it to the World cup. Reigning world champions don't make it out of the group stage. Even a goat candidate like Messi, on an Argentinian team with a lot of other top players hasn't won a world cup yet.
So, basically, the level of global competition is very high, a lot can happen in a single game and being at the top (or even getting into the semi final) is not guaranteed for anyone. This level of competition is the major difference compared to US-centric sports like basketball, baseball and American Football, which are an afterthought in most other countries.
And while there's nothing that suggests that US could not catch up to other countries and become one of the favorites once they underwent the transformation to a top soccer country, there's also nothing that suggests the US would completely dominate the RotW in a way never seen before.
"#1 easily" doesn't happen for anyone in soccer. And it wouldn't be different for the US.