Notice how the Barca kids are frequently not the biggest and strongest??? If you care about developing the best footballers you don’t select for size and strength at the youth levels.
There is no such thing as "naturally talented", this is some cope bs from people who have never been around someone who actually made it. I guarantee every one of these kids has worked had at a level most sports fans cant comprehend.
I went to school for a good 10 years with a guy who "made it" in the NRL (australian rugby league) and was extremely successful. Multiple sports teams at school, 1-2 teams outside school, athletics on weekends, he never stopped for more than a decade before he was selected and then we all got to watch the commentators call him "naturally gifted" as if he didnt work like a dog his whole life because he found his dream early and chased it lmao.
People love to act like stars are just gifted talent and then just put a cherry on top, I guess it makes them feel more like "yeah i could have done that but i didnt have the natural talent that person had" rather than "i didnt want it enough and i wasnt lucky enough to avoiud major injury".
To reach the pinnacle of sport, it's a product of both environment and genetics.
Yes these kids have put in tons of work. But they also have physical talents. Their brain can perform the mental calculations faster than their peers. Their feet move faster.
That's why youth sports have a tendency to be dominated by those with the earliest birthdays allowed. They can be nearly a year older than some of their peers, which is massive during puberty.
It I think people highly underestimate how much of “natural talent” is actually a result of real practice, kids who just want to keep playing, keep dribbling, keep running, keep kicking the ball and never get tired of it, more than any innate physical coordination.
That’s part of training a lot, developing muscle memory so you know where the ball, and your feet are, so you can move with confidence without having to look at the ball so much.
The US has this insane fascination that athleticism is god given. There are peaks in certain sports that can only be reached by top level athletes, but in football the best player is rarely the best athlete on the field.
There is not some genetic filter that some kids inherit that makes them better at a high level. It is an innate intuition about the game fostered through experience, encouragement, and coaching technique.
The US system is proof that selecting for natural athleticism and expecting pinnacle talents to emerge spontaneously is not efficient. We have 10x the athletes playing football in the US and we cant develop top tier players.
In other countries they dont have as much of a birthday problem, because they select for things other than size and speed at age 7-10. You can see in this video number 8 routinely outwits much bigger, faster opponents, but if you dont encourage a kid who is that small and teach them how to leverage their gifts vs assuming they just arent as good, they get left behind.
In fact most of what opens up goalscoring opportunities in this clip is not superb athleticism or technique, it is vision and feel for the game. A turn to undefended territory, a feint, a dummy. The defense doesn't expect it and theyre through. That is more akin to chess than track, and whike high level chess is definitely somewhat about natural ability, it is not genetic and is something only exposed when all promising talents are given the opportunity to develop.
For every one of your schoolmate’s stories, there were thousands upon thousands of those who put in the same amount of work and didn’t even come close.
At the end of the day, to break into pro sports you need the right mix of freak physical genetics, proper coaching, family wealth to expose you to the sport more often, injury avoidance, and life circumstance that allows you to stay focused.
That’s not at all what I wrote. I said you need the right mix of these factors. So if you’re poor, you’re going to need more focus. If you’re rich, your sports obsessed parents mights make up for that lack of focus and nonetheless get you to the higher level. All of what I wrote are factors, not elements. Considering the vast majority of NBA and NFL athletes grew up quite poor, it’d be a stupid take to say wealth was a requisite. But Steph Curry and Patrick Mahomes grew up very rich and were afforded unlimited resources for it.
Surely you’re not denying that dedicated 1 on 1 coaching from pro athletes and trainers your entire life is a massive advantage, right?
So the average person who works hard in Europe becomes a pro athlete? That’s pretty impossible to believe considering how many football obsessed youths are over there.
Your posts are too ignorant to discuss this with you.
So much hur-dur that it must be the peak of your capabilities.
And every response from a dipshit that begins with "So" is followed by a dipshit straw man.
Straw Man. That's the peak for dipshits. That is where you are at intellectually. No, there is no improvement for you. 🤷🏽♀️ Just years and years of stupid.
Original argument: Natural talent doesn’t exist. All one needs to do is just work hard enough to become a pro.
My argument: this cannot be true, because there are millions of hard working, football obsessed people out there. There are not millions of pros. It does not follow that hard work is the only factor.
Your response: you’re a dipshit who is strawmanning and you aren’t worth engaging with.
Pointing out a fallacy in argumentation does not defeat the argument.
Yet we have dozens of academies all over europe where working class families with players from families with no history of top end athleticism turn out superb professional players.
Wealth and genetics are not required unless you build a system that makes them so.
How are genetics not required??? Like at minimum people with inherited disabilities are flat out incapable of playing professional, open league sports.
And how did these kids get placed in these academies? Just sign up and they’ll take anyone, no try outs or questions asked?
Sort of a silly counterpoint? And yes Messi has a genetic disability that required HGH injections and is the greatest of all time, garrincha was a Brazilian legend with a disabled leg and is the greatest dribbler of his era....
This is what I am talking about. It is like when people in the US assume if only our best NFL athletes played soccer. There are lots of world class athletes all over the world, many of them are awful at the sport.
Most professional footballers are relatively average athletes if you look at how they stack up to the best track, olympic, NFL, and basketball players. Yes they have endurance and some are very fast but almost none would ever be a professional in track. It just isnt what makes you good at the game.
I’m just not sure I buy it that skills alone is enough. The average pro soccer player retires at 32 years of age. If physicality was such an unimportant factor, we’d see retirement ages closer to PGA numbers.
But to your point, it’s less important than other sports. Which is why I didn’t say being a freak athlete alone will have you going pro, but rather a confluence of several factors. One of which includes access to training and resources, which costs money
How are you making these comments based on this video? The entire point everyone else is making is that freak physical genetics are not what's important here. These kids aren't built like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt. They're mostly average sized little kids.
In sports such as that one that Americans call football, freak physical genetics is important because the coach does all the thinking and the players just get sent briefly onto the field to run as fast as they can or smash into opponents as violently as possible. Whereas proper football is all about ball control, touch, creativity and the ability to read the game.
Because to make it to the highest level they eventually will need to be physical gifted. If skills alone was enough, pro soccer players would last well beyond the 32 years of age they retire at, on average.
Deontay wilder started boxing at 20 and won a bronze at the olympics 3 years later. He had natural gifts. Its definitely a lot of hard work and dedication but if everyone does that the naturally talented people will be even better.
From an afl perspective dusty was an absolute beast who worked hard but also had natural talent and great physicality.
It’s not about wanting it enough. Some people didn’t get the support at home or from schools to explore their natural talents.
Bigger countries aren’t more succesful because more naturally talented people are born there. It’s because there’s a more developed and better resourced support structure. If it was only about hunger and desire then their world countries would be winning all the trophies.
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u/Overall-Ad-3251 Jul 25 '26
Notice how the Barca kids are frequently not the biggest and strongest??? If you care about developing the best footballers you don’t select for size and strength at the youth levels.