He's only like 5'7" now so it's not like they made him a giant. Giving growth hormones to kids with deficiency is, I think, standard medical practice now. I know a boy who got HGH and ended up like 5'6". It was done to prevent dwarfism and promote healthy development.
It wouldn't be an advantage to make him a giant - arguably it would be a negative due to his style. However, HGH allows substantially faster recover, and basically any athlete would take it if possible. Messi was able to do so legally unlike most footballers due to his condition.
When I was a kid, I always heard some Uncle claim that "rich people" bribe the doctors to give growth hormone to their children. That's why supposedly all the "rich people" children were tall (being well fed probably helps here)
Is that real that the rich, VC types give growth hormone to their children?
Good quality dairy is associated with high insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) levels in blood, which in turn leads to rapid cell growth. This explains why e.g. Dutch people went from being the shortest to the tallest in Europe.
I always thought that was more of a conspiracy that milk helps you to grow. My mum always tried to get me with that but I always didn't give a damn because I thought it's not true anyway.
I'm not up to date on the science, but my dad was old - born in '43 - and worked as a teacher, so he could see several generations grow up. He was tall for his generation, but by the time I was a teenager, he was tiny even compared to his teenage students. I was a head taller than him even before he started "old man shrinking".
He always pointed at food, that the generations after him had access to better stuff and more milk. The shortest member of my family is my niece who is totally anti-milk, but that's just anecdata.
So it might be some other macro-factor influencing growth, with milk being the most glaringly visible item on the table. But it does kind of make an intuitive sense, and the dutch are freakishly tall while they have some of the best dairy products in the world
I suspect it's more about not being deficient in nutrients that milk (and especially the reinforced variety sold in many countries) happen to be rich in.
Meaningless anecdata, but as a child and teenager I absolutely loved milk (I was drinking 1 liter of it a day in my teen years). I grew to be 190 cm (around 6 ft 3 inches), whereas both of my parents are around 1 foot shorter.
I loved milk but it didn't counteract Italian genes, I'm 5 foot 6 which is fortunately normal in my country (Uruguay) but would be short-ish in the USA.
I haven't heard of physical growth hormones per se, but it's definitely true of the psychological equivalent that is Adderall and related methamphetamine prescriptions for ADHD or "ADHD." It does wonders for getting kids to sit down and study, but at who-knows-what cost.
anecdotally, a lot of families around me seem to give these shots to kids in S. Korea and it doesn't seem like the vast majority of them "need" it. kind of crazy to me, but just an extension of how much looks are valued culturally here.
Messi's captured the hearts of the casual World Cup fan unlike anyone else. I don't know a whole lot about soccer -- more or less all I know is that the World Cup happens every few years, is played by national teams, and Messi makes impossible plays. What I do know is all because of Messi, whose wholesome relatability and exceptional ability brings casual viewers like me; I generally avoid sports because the players are hard to relate to or have personal flaws, but I love Messi's strong family roots. I would propose that merely for being a truly exceptional face of the sport he's the GOAT.
Maybe Maradona was that way in his day -- I'm barely aware that he was a good player of yesteryear -- but his drug problems (and the fact that his heyday was so long ago) make him much less relatable or exciting to investigate as a inspiration.
I am not interested in sports but when I was in my teens, no other name was associated with any sport as was the name of Pele with football. As you said, it seemed no one was interested in football but everyone knew Pele was the god of his game.
Lol, yeah. That game in 1986 must have hurt. One of the most beautiful goals of all time (which Messi has replicated twice), then that awful hand-of-g-d goal (which Messi, sadly, has also replicated twice).
The Hand of God is a clear foul, but the Goal of the Century is clean as a whistle. Funnily, these two goals alone — both so different — are pretty much the summary of Diego Maradona
I was too young to remember the game but I still remember the cultural impact of that goal in England as a kid. The fact we still talk about Maradona surely places him as one of the greats!
I'm not sure it makes sense to compare greats of different generations. In athletics we can clearly see the improvement from generation to generation so if you plucked them out at their heights Messi is probably a better player than Maradona and Maradona a better player than Pelé, but had they all played at the same time who knows?
Health issues cutting his career short ensured he won't be in consideration for most people. That said, he truly was phenomenal. Absolutely one of the most amazing to ever play the game.
If you compare Messi's record with Maradona's, there's not much to compare. The latter could have been the best of all time, but he sabotaged his own career.
Right, and it is country-oriented which is fairly arbitrary, not team-oriented as most football is played. It's possible the best football team in the world(probably the UEFA Champions League champs) could beat the winner of the FIFA World Cup(barring the fact that some of the same players may be on both teams), since the best football team can and does draw from many different countries.
I think it is generally understand that the best football clubs would far stronger than the best national teams. At the very least club team players play and train together the whole year, while national teams only have a few weeks every couple of years.
You missed the basic point: it is not about the UEFA: if you can build a team with the best (team) players in the world, it would beat other teams that are based on nationality or specific leagues like UEFA. If Qatar wants they can build a better team than the UEFA ones. Hint: look at Barça.
I think @wslh is saying the if you put the best players from multiple countries together (eg, if Qatar decided to spend unlimited money to build a club team that would be eligable for UEFA club competitions) that team would be the best.
>>Hint: look at Barça.
> What do you mean
This is a reference to the Barcelona teams built with basically unlimited budgets that have dominated the European Cup.
Of course, Qatar sort of does have a UEFA team called Manchester City via the state-run Qatar Airlines sponsorship. It has a basically unlimited budget and has dominated the English premier league for a while now (although it has struggled in European competition).
Don't forget Qatari owned Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) also. PSG is the club that Lionel Messi and his opposing number 10 from the World Cup Final, French star Kylian Mbappe, play for together in the French football league. Similar to Manchester City, they are often the best team in their country and frequently participate in the UEFA Champions League
Barça and PSG/City are very different beasts. Barcelona (like many clubs throughout Europe and South America) is member-owned. You can become a "sócio" (partner) and vote in elections for the club's director team.
PSG and City are glorified marketing vessels for human rights abusing autocracies. Very different.
Qatar owns the PSG. Also the UEFA implemented compensation caps and other measures to prevent the Qatari/Saudi/Emirati from buying out their clubs.
Another point: You can have the best team in the world, but it won't be the best team unless it plays against someone else (preferably many other teams). The game is interesting because the winner is uncertain. If the winner becomes certain at all times (or worse, all the rankings) then there is no reason to play the game anymore.
It’s incredibly annoying how whenever someone calls the game “soccer”, a smug European person pipes up to say that it’s really called “football”.
(And yes, I’ve only ever seen Europeans doing this, not people from any of the other parts of the world where it’s also called football).
Is it really so hard for you to accept that there are different words for things in different countries, and that not all cultures are identical to your own?
Both games evolved from the collection of related pre-modern games that were all called “football”, as did rugby, Australian football, and some others.
In every English-speaking country, whichever of these related games is most popular is simply called “football”.
It’s unclear whether the name derives from kicking the ball with the foot (which happens to a greater or lesser extent in all such games), or from the fact that they’re played on foot (rather than e.g. on horseback).
1889, socca, later socker (1891), soccer (1895), originally university slang (with jocular formation -er (3)), from a shortened form of Assoc., abbreviation of association in Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football); compare rugger. An unusual method of formation, but those who did it perhaps shied away from making a name out of the first three letters of Assoc. Compare 1890s English schoolboy slang leccer, from lecture (n.).
To your point, the first college football game in the US was, simultaneously, the first college soccer game because it took place before the split between soccer and rugby, and the rules were those drafted by the Football Association in England. The rugby rules were adopted by Canadian colleges, who went on to play against American colleges, who adopted the rugby rules and added the initial changes that created American football.
A gridiron football is still clearly a ball in function, even if not spherical, just like how a rugby ball is still called a ball.
The word "football" has been used to describe games played without kicking for centuries. A possible etymology is that it means not a game played with the feet, but a game played on foot. It could describe any of the games played by peasants, as opposed to the equestrian sports (racing, polo, dressage) played by aristocrats.
I just erased a long rant about this, because no one needs to read another one.
But I'll summarize: Our refusal to adopt the metric system is really a symptom of everything that's wrong with the country today. I blame organized religion.
You have no idea how accurate and profound your statement is. The mid 1800s religious extremism still survives in the US and plagues its public discourse and institutions in the form of anti-intellectualism.
The American anti-intellectualism is far stronger compared to all the forms of anti-intellectualism across the world, and its surprisingly wide-reaching - a lot of the anti-intellectual behaviors of the religious American crowd of 1850s survive today and manifest themselves in different forms. From opposing science to conservatism in silly things like the resistance to the metric system and more.
French intellectuals want us to divide by the number of fingers we have, because man is the measure of all things. They’re also in league with mathematicians and some foreign Arabian number system.
English engineers much prefer a 12-based system where you can design, construct and build easily— dividing measurements by 2, 3, and 4– where practicality is foremost.
I do think French atheism is at the root of it yes.
P.S. completely trolling/kidding!
P.P.S. Long before the metric system, the French were calling a dozen dozen “grosse”. The prejudice goes long back and it isn’t from us Angle-ophones!
> the French were calling a dozen dozen “grosse”. The prejudice goes long back and it isn’t from us Angle-ophones!
Hell yeah it is - the never-ending English, later British propaganda against France goes back 600 years. Against Spain, it goes back 500 years. A lot of that seems to have been carried over to its former colonies.
You can have the best of both worlds: when I'm fixing my daughter's curtain rail, I use mm to measure distance from the window frame because if I use fractions of an inch I'm far more likely to bugger up the maths. But if I want to tell someone my height, I will use feet and inches as those are more human-scale and convenient than metric. For packaging and products there seems no logical reason to not cite both, although the EU mandated metric-only
I think at one time, we probably went our own way because we were first or best.
But today it just seems hardheaded. And it's not just metric...you have ANSI vs ISO, electrical systems, 4g and 5g radio bands, etc. With a world population 20 times the US population, I foresee a lot more companies just deciding it doesn't make financial sense to bother with the US market. We already see that with smartphones.
I've seen only opposite. I live in Europe and no European I've talked to cares about football or soccer (and they tend to say "soccer" when they speak to Americans)
But I've heard a lot of Americans say "no it's called soccer" when they heard the term football
Soccer redirects to “Association football” on Wikipedia. I am American and I find “soccer” to be disingenuous to the sport, since “Football” referring to the ol’ hogskin takes priority but is primarily an American sport.
The word "soccer" started in England as a slang of "association," which became "assocc" and then "soccer." Americans learned the word from the English.
It may also surprise you to learn that water closets are called restrooms in other countries that speak English.
This is similar to getting upset that in various countries an apple is called “pomme”, “manzana”, “apple”, etc. Shouldn’t we call it by the name it’s called in whichever country it was first cultivated?
In fact no, we shouldn’t, because different languages and dialects have different words for things, and that’s just a fact of life.
If you're speaking a different language, using a different word is fine. But if you presume to claim to be speaking "English", then you should use the word they use in England.
I claim to speak American English. I don’t recognize any dialect of English, including my own, as the primary one that all others have to follow, because English is a pluricentric language. I’ll never tell someone from England, Ireland, Australia, India, Zimbabwe etc. that their version of English is wrong, and they shouldn’t tell me that mine is either.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to English, by the way. Every language spoken in more than one country (AFAIK) has some words that vary between countries.
Your argument is a bit ridiculous IMO, it’s like saying neovim should merge every patch that gets merged to vim.
I'm choosing to discard it precisely because it isn't relevant, as I said. When and where a word was coined implies nothing about what languages it is and isn't a part of today.
Indeed, but “soccer” is part of American English today. Why should we stop using a word just because people in a different country stopped using it? Is your argument really that we should speak identically to people in England, because the language happens to be called “English” ?
I think you should either conform to English English, or treat American as a first-class language of its own (and e.g. start offering translated websites).
Hah. My Spanish is riddled with errors, I admit, even though I lived in Spanish speaking countries for about 5 years. Coger is a word I just completely avoid at all costs. Terminar also. I learn mostly by public embarrassment, and patient explanation, so please tell me why it wouldn't be proper to say "pick up your football" that way?
Not in the USA it isn’t, and this website is hosted in the USA and it seems likely that at least the largest plurality, if not majority, of readers live in the USA.
of all the arguments in the world this is the worst one. A nationalist leftover reminding us that while the internet has potential for global unity, someone will forcibly drag it down to worldly borders
There's a subreddit called r/toprightmessi which is a collection of graphs showing how much Messi excels in so many respects. Crazy how in the biggest sport in the world there can be a player so far above and beyond the rest.
Alternatively, is it due to the ubiquity of soccer that particularly gifted individuals can be developed into their full potential? Someone that has a one-in-a-billion level of skill in something like frisbee-golf is less likely to be spotted and made into a professional player.
Sprinting is probably the purest example of no child not having a shot. Kids like to run. In fact, running is probably the most comprehensively sampled sport in the world. It's virtually impossible for anyone with a remotely normal childhood and a gift for sprinting to not know that they have it. Every kid knows who the fastest kid on their playground is. Every kid knows who the fastest kid in their class is, and in their school. And the fastest kids in each school/neighborhood/whatever compete at higher and higher levels until one day the fastest one is eating Chicken McNuggets[1] and signing 30 million dollar endorsement deals.
This is the weird thing for me about some of these discussions. I'm not going to question Messi's ability or ability in general but I've always wondered how much "extraindividual" factors start to play a role in those upper tails that are incentivized. We talk about Messi like he's just a marble sculpture handed down from God but that's not the case.
Looking at the figure, for example, one thing I noticed was the gap between the two upper points and the rest. It's hard for me to imagine there aren't some missing points there.
In other fields or areas, I think you have to start asking about things like fraud, other vice, or circumstances.
As you suggest, there's probably also some unique things about international football that make it difficult to generalize to other things. Everything is probably a little unique in certain ways really, but the incentives are so extreme and the play is very visible.
One thing to note is that the stats in the article don't appear to be normalized to me. It's just a lot of "# of X since 2010". So, it makes sense that the best will be played more often and get more play time to help drive the separation greater.
This is so true when looking at the distribution of top olympic athletes Vs distribution of countries that invest in developing said athletes in their chosen sport.
Do you know of any sites offhand that discuss this? I can look it up but wasn't sure if there were some you'd recommend. The thing you're mentioning seems really important as an example in these kinds of discussions.
As a fan of disc golf I pained and laughed at “frisbee-golf”. The distribution of talent and accomplishment in professional disc golf .. a relatively young sport .. wouldn’t surprise anyone here.
Yes, but if you have many fat tailed distributions, increasing the sample size makes it increasingly less likely that it's _the same person at the end each time_
Recommended. For further context, it's the narration of an article written in Spanish by H. Casciari, translated to English.
It's a lovely but also profound literary article in the subject of Messi never losing sight of the ball, while also a critique on modern day analysis of the game and its influence on player behavior.
Why would it be? All careers with leverage seem to follow a Pareto distribution. It would surprise me if any sport, art, or creative endeavor was normally distributed.
You're right. I was thinking the "initial talent" might be normal in the way IQ scores are, but the parent was talking about actual performance, where history, training, etc all come into play.
And empirically, you have Gretzky in hockey, Jordan in basketball....
IQ is normally distributed because it's graded on a curve to make that true by definition. I'm not sure how it's distributed on any sort of 'natural' scale.
No, it's scaled but linearly and not redistributed.
There's still studies of relatively raw distributions and it still looks normal. The biggest deviations from normality are due to an excess mass in the lower range due to disease, and a tendency for scores to spike a tiny bit at certain numbers, probably due to people administering the test fudging a bit sometimes for various reasons.
Maybe a cross-species IQ score would be interesting. Chimpanzees and corvids both can solve many IQ-test problems, but also are not experiencing the Flynn effect as far as we know. So we could measure IQ in multiples of a chimp's IQ, just like we measure cars in multiple's of a workhorse's sustainable pulling output. (Which is actually a less objective measure, when you think about it; we were breeding workhorses to increase that very target at the time the concept of "horsepower" was invented!)
That would be a great start. And it would also force us to acknowledge that a lot of the things that we are doing with these animals are utterly un-ethical.
I don’t even think initial talent is normally distributed. Take Usain Bolt, for example, he’d be a far outlier in a Pareto distribution for sprinters just on the basis of his natural heritage.
I suppose the distribution of aptitude would be a normal distribution in a world where careers were assigned randomly at birth and advancing in your career was on a strict seniority basis. So, for example, you'd see it in career paths that are mostly followed as generational family businesses.
keep in mind that even if football ability were (untrainable and) normally distributed, the distribution of ability among international players would be taken from one of the tails of that bell.
Also a good point. Do you know what the exact distribution would be when sampling randomly and rejecting all values below some threshold? You can tell it would at least be Pereto-ish in general shape.
This sounds like nonsense. We're talking about multivariate distributions, and you haven't defined a norm by which ordinal comparisons can be made between sample points.
Norms are for dealing with magnitude not direction (and were brought up by my parent commenter). If you care about direction specify an angle, quadrant, cone or other subregion that allows you to take the limit to infinity which then doesn’t depend on the norm. Note this is the same in the univariate case where we talk about left and right tail if we need to distinguish.
In the end it doesn’t whether we go to infinity in one norm or the other.
Note that I am talking about finite dimensions, so I guess you didn’t mean the L^p norms or \ell^p for integrable functions or sequences but the finite-dimensional p-norms.
This theorem is completely irrelevant - the equivalence relation described by the theorem does not imply an equivalence between ordinal relationships imposed by different choice of norm. Also, "tails" isn't the same as "at infinity".
If you were to define some new sport from scratch tomorrow morning by the end of the afternoon the Bell curve would start to assert itself in those that chose to play in it and over time that would become more and more evident. Eventually a 'Messi' would turn up.
You say bell curve, which I understand as meaning normally distributed, but the point about Messi is that he is better than what one would expect to find from normally distributed ability.
I think it is interesting to ask why Messi is such an outlier. But maybe you think the fact that someone has to be best makes it all uninteresting.
I think that effect comes from soccer being somewhat multi-dimensional: the ability to run fast, aim well, have stamina and so on.
And yes, I think that the fact that someone will be the best makes it uninteresting, or at least a lot less interesting than if a skill could be universally taught to the point where everybody would be very good at it and it would be productive.
Professional sports is roughly at the same level of interest to me as a circus.
Apparently, a good batting average for a modern-day batsman is 40+ with those above 50 being exceptional. Bradman's average was 99.94. The second highest average of all time is 60.97.
It's difficult to emphasize what a complete statistical outlier Bradman is.
As the parent poster points out, the next highest average is in the low 60s (actually 61.87 now[1]). Looking at the stats though, we see averages are roughly a normal curve, centered on 40 with a standard deviation of a little over 9[2]. This puts Bradman over 6 standard deviations above average!
I'd be surprised if anyone in any large scale sport ever dominated like Bradman or will be as dominant in the future. He missed part of the prime of his career due to WW2, so who knows what could have happened if he'd avoided the interruption.
He's probably not as well known as someone like Gretzky in North America, so his name wouldn't immediately spring to mind on forums like this. In cricket, there just isn't any debate about the greatest - the only area of interest is about who comes next (Viv Richards or Brian Lara in my opinion)
> He's probably not as well known as someone like Gretzky in North America, so his name wouldn't immediately spring to mind on forums like this.
I think you might find there are a fairly large number of Indian, Australian and English people on this forum who will find his name does spring to mind immediately. It's more about the timezone than numbers.
> who comes next (Viv Richards or Brian Lara in my opinion)
Tendulkar.
Viv Richards was amazing at his best but declined badly. Lara's best innings were better than anyone (maybe even Bradman) but he wasn't as consistent and unfortunately he was playing in a declining team.
But I'm old enough to remember his 1993 innings of 277 at the SCG. In some ways that was enough to hold off Australia being undisputably the best team in the world for another couple of years.
Not that Gretzky wasn’t great. He indisputably was and his title as the GOAT of hockey is totally fair.
However, these records are incredibly influenced by the era he played in. Look at a list of the highest scoring seasons for teams ever and it’s either far pre expansion or the late 70s and 80s - Gretzky’s era.
Messi’s records are astounding for the reason that soccer scoring trends have remained far more stable (imo)
Referees are nicer to attackers nowadays, plus there's several rule tweaks done in recent decades to make attacking more worthwhile. Goals scored at WC bottomed in 1990 iirc.
Most athletes who are at the top of their sport when they reach age ~40 tend to be crazy outliers. I’m thinking Michael Schumacher (F1), Tom Brady (NFL), Roger Federer (tennis), etc.
They are outliers because it's a brand new phenomenon. This generation has the first sportsmen to push 40 in a lot of sports, beit Federer, James Anderson, Brady, Ibrahimovic. It will become quite common as time goes on I expect.
p.s. Schumacher drove a car, so I'm not sure he is a fair comparison to physical sportsmen
F1 drivers are required to be extremely fit. Braking and cornering at over 4G for almost 2 hours, applying well over 300lb pressure to the brake pedal repeatedly, in cockpit temperatures over 110F, would destroy most athletes from other sports.
It’s not hyperbolic in the slightest. Which other discipline would condition its participants to endure the combination of forces and temperatures over the duration I described above?
Doesn't that prove my point that they are completely different things and not comparable?
If you read my other comment you will see my line of reasoning. At no point have I denigrated racing drivers, so there's no need to rush to their defence.
If that’s your point then yes, fair enough, there is no direct comparison. The way your original P.S. was worded gave the opposite impression though, and “racing drivers aren’t athletes” seems to be a POV many people have.
I never demeaned racing drivers. I just don't think they are a fair comparison to physical sportsmen who turn and jink and sprint in an open physical space and the effect this has on their bodies.
Going past an opposition player in basketball, football or rugby is very similar. Sprinting to the line to keep a ball in play is something tennis players, footballers and cricketers all do.
Driving is entirely different, and not really comparable.
And he just got his finals MVP in 2022, kind of the only thing people lamented about for their careers.
They have pretty interesting similarities:
* their teams in their primes, GSW and Barcelona are both dynasty teams with highest level teamplay. GSW rountinely have the highest number assists in the league, Barcelona have more successive passes than almost any other teams.
* they are both considered more technical and humble comparing to peers like L. James, and C. Ronaldo, which pocess more physical talents and show dominant personalities
Specifically, in Javascript you can superficially push a navigated state into the location stack so that when the user presses the back button, it is now the inserted page instead of the “actual” one. Most FE devs consider this a dark pattern and refuse to implement it.
That said, it’s basically just the front end’s version of a redirect. Unfortunately it’s been used a lot especially by malware sites to basically jail people into their site.
I tried to when I worked at The Huffington Post a long time ago and was ridiculed. Some people don't care so they can point to increased metrics, ethics be damned.
No, it wouldn't be that. That can only prevent unload if it throws a native modal up (cousin of alert, confirm, prompt, etc).
I think what they must have done is push some URL to the history state, using the History API, to fuck with the back and forward buttons, enabling them to intercept when you navigate back, by having added an additional page in there, that you never visited, but that they can use to serve you this interstitial.
It would be immensely fun as a layperson to go up against Messi just to see how many seconds of trying to separate the ball from his possession I could go before I’ve tripped over my own feet and am laughing hysterically at the sheer magic of what he’s able to do.
I used to play semi pro volleyball in late puberty. We had a quite nice school team and we were second in regional championship which was taking place in the largest city of the country. One day while we were having a workout a friend of our coach showed up who was playing in the national team so we asked him to participate. Dude was willing to do so and from the way he played it was obvious he wasn’t really trying. So at one point he’s on the offensive and I jump to block him which I did. The one thing I remember even three decades later is just how much my palms hurt. Both my hands had gone numb. There was a lot of cheer and he came alongside to congratulate me, but all I was thinking at the moment was fuck this hurts so much. I can’t even imagine how it would feel had he gone full force while hitting the ball, although I seriously doubt I could have blocked it if he did.
A layman person can’t realize how vast the gap is between him/her and a pro player, let alone elite players. My guess is that you wouldn’t even have the time to react because he’s so agile he can change direction in a fraction of a second. You wouldn’t trip and fall, you’d simply stood still and by the time you’d register what happened he’d be ten feet behind you.
I'm big into tennis and have worked at a very prestigious (but non-major) tournament before. I've seen some of the top guys hit and it's mind-blowing how good they are.
I've also managed to hit with some former college guys who made top 500 ATP. they are insanely good with hard serves and insanely accurate ground strokes. the difference between those guys and a top level player is night and day...scary how good top athletes really are.
Also several years ago played in a pickup soccer game with a guy who washed out of Manchester United's academy as a 14 year old. In that same pickup game were guys who at the time were playing D1 soccer, and a few had spent time in MLS academies. The ex-United guy was lightyears ahead of everyone else despite having been out of the game for nearly 10 years and having a bad knee. The guys who make it to the top are utterly incomprehensible for a layman to understand.
It's just like how if you're playing a GM in chess, and you might be a decent enough player yourself, you won't even sniff a chance of doing well much less winning. Those same GMs turn around and get effortlessly destroyed by Carlsen or other top players. It's just a different level that us civilians cannot fathom.
I agree. There is so much more talent the higher you ascend. Reminds me of an article about the struggle for someone to make Olympic qualifiers.
I would also like to say that you must be quite athletic and talented to be playing with former ATP 500 tennis and D1 and youth professional football players. Congrats!
Heh no - not really that good. The former ATP 500 player literally lives in my building and hits with a few guys here who he's known for a while (also former college guys who played at the ATP level briefly) and I've been fortunate to be able to jump in on occasion as one of those guys is a good friend of mine who invites me from time to time. Can't say I can really hang at that level for very long. I didn't even play on my high school team!
Football wise, even worse - I just picked up the game playing in college and in local games growing up but was never any good. The ex-United kid quit the sport and moved to the US for school and lived near the local pitch where the pickup matches were held and he would just wander over for yucks. He ran (walked, really, due to his knee) rings around everyone.
I had a similar experience to yours. I used to do MMA and got fairly good. I’ve trained with people who fought locally in the ring and did ok with them in sparring matches. They were clearly better but I did ok against them. One day I ended up sparring with someone who eventually went on to become a semi finalist in the Ultimate Fighter. It was like I was 5 years old fighting a college student. I could do nothing against him. He completely destroyed me. He didn’t have a successful UFC career. I can’t imagine what it would be like to fight a top tier pro.
I read something a while back that was the same for hockey. When you see NHL players passing the puck around the average person has no idea the incredible wrist and arm strength required to make and take those passes.
I think it might have been a reddit thread where a commenter said that a guy came and played on their rec league that had played semi-pro hockey (maybe AHL) and even then nobody on the team could handle his passes. The commenter said it felt like his wrists were going to break.
Yeah, I was thinking about this a bit more and realized that unless he were specifically trying to make an exhibition of it, it would be really mundane. He’d approach, make one quick move and go right by. The sheer futility would still have me laughing though.
Shielding the ball is one the first things you learn to do in football. Even an average player should be able to keep a "layperson" away from the ball indefinitely, no magic required.
Magic only matters when you're trying to beat multiple players or someone who is roughly the same skill level as you, otherwise you can literally just run past them or beat them with a simple cut.
Oh yeah, that is like racing against top drivers! Similar to a sibling comment, I remember a story. It was me taking part in a karts race, just for fun of course, and in the group was this kid who was like 10 or 12?, and in less than 5 laps he built a gap so large, and 10 more laps later I ended up exhausted doing my theoretical best (trying to follow "best" racing lines and all) while he was just doing a warmup. After we finished, I talked to him and he told me that he was going to take part of the world Karting championship in two months later at the time, and I felt so trash compared to him. It was eye opening in a way that makes you wonder if their brain processes the world similarly to you, or if they are built too overpowered for us mere mortals.
Since every Messi thread somehow ends up with Ronaldo, there is a video where Ronaldo is "smurfing" disguised with a fake beard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68E53lcUIKE
The video is not really that interesting.
As for "entire team playing against a team of laypeople" - I would like to see something like this too. Best we can have is probably the match between American Samoa and Australia that ended 0-31
FIFA has a product that is a glittering diamond for ascending or old (authoritarian) regimes irrespective of whether FIFA exerts any influence on the content itself (the games). That just doesn’t matter and also isn’t necessary so why should they even try to touch that? Makes no rational sense.
FIFA’s job is to get the teams that make the glittering diamond to play in the WC without too much fuss and without making any problems. In that context doing shady shit on the playfield would even be counterproductive.
If all (important) national teams feel like the games themselves are fair and that they are heard when there are problems on the playfield then at least that‘s not an additional area of conflict.
For that reason I think it‘s extremely unlikely for corruption to actually extend to the playfield. It‘s just no needed and even counterproductive. I think that might actually be the thing that actually breaks FIFA‘s power, so I would think that they don’t touch it.
He touches his back foot while Di Maria is still running. BBC commentators all also agreed it was a clear pen(and I'm romanian just to dispel political bias hopefully).
Geopolitics that is in favor of Argentina?? That does not make any sense.
I would buy that story if it were for China - look at all the ads and they even built the stadium. Too fantasy though since China men’s soccer team is a total joke
They spend 10 times more than the other countries to host the world cup. They want it to be a big hit. That's why FIFA has been saying that this is the best wold cup ever and bla bla bla.
In 2018 there was 29 penalties in total. This year there is 17 penalties during the matches (including the final so far), with Argentina getting 5 out of 17.
That’s meaningless without a denominator. All other things being equal, the team with more time spent in the opponents box would be expected to have more penalty kicks.
EDIT: And just as I write this France draws a penalty!
I have no horse in this fight, just wanted to point out a curious fact.
That said, the denominator/ top team argument only holds if Argentina was the most dominant team in the cup by a landslide (considering the ratio of the total penalties). They weren’t, they performed mostly in the same pack of France/England/ Portugal. Brazil would be the only team that was blatantly more dominant. Another denominator could potentially be number of foul against, and I would be surprised if it is that lopsided.
It's not about France or Argentina. It's about the PSG, a club owned by Qatar (buye... ahem... host of the world cup), where both Messi and Mbappé plays.
I'm not defending France or anything. I dislike both teams, my team got eliminated a while ago.
But take a look at Argentina - Croatia. Argentina was way superior after the first 20 min or so, but Croatia was still holding. After the penalty Croatia was no longer playing football. When Argentina scored the second goal the defense was scared of even approaching the ball. A penalty in a tournament like this can kill the morale easily.
This happened all the time with Barcelona and Messi in the "golden" years. He's still a great player, but... ither should be allowed to play against fairly.
@Darmody, if only you had used a word like "commerce" or "business" instead of "geopolitics". This match and WC seems like good business. Also I'm not entertained but that was their intention I guess.
This is just an unhappy sports fan howling at the moon. The ref is a fallible human being who makes mistakes, but the consensus was that the match was called impeccably well. The penalties awarded were correct. Ref also carded France for diving that was really hard to see in real-time but he was definitely correct.
These athletes are beyond any of my abilities to even comprehend their level of skill by I always wonder if it is just recency bias or are these athletes truly the greatest of all time.
Multiple 100+ year old sports seems to have coincided their arguably greatest of all time players play at roughly the same time. Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Sachin Tendulkar, Usain Bolt, Lebron James, Michael Phelps, Michael Schumacher, Magnus Carlsen.
No doubt they are just that good but so many of them playing at around the same time is very interesting to me.
I think you have to factor in the amount of technology (i.e. video review of technique, mocap, etc), training level, 'performance' programs (diet, additives, etc) and of course pay/background funds these athletes compete through. More time, more training, better stuff that many past athletes could only dream of.
In saying that, Messi is on another planet, with perhaps Pelé , Michael Jordan and Ayrton Senna...
> Multiple 100+ year old sports seems to have coincided their arguably greatest of all time players play at roughly the same time.
I agree!
> ... Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal,
And most of all Novak Djokovic. It's totally insane that these three were playing at the same time. Now Djokovic has 373 weeks as world number 1 (Federer 310 weeks, Nadal 209), 21 grand slams (Federer 20, Nadal 22), six ATP World Tour Finals -- arguably the hardest tournament ever-- (Federer six too, Nadal zero) and contrarily to the others (if I'm not mistaken) Djokovic also held the four Grand Slams at once (consecutively but over two years).
Even though Federer was a bit older these three mostly played at the same time and that is completely insane. It makes their achievements even more incredible: the records each of them would have had one of the two others not been there would have been even more unbelievable.
Idea for this visualization: Highlight every season for Messi (multiple colored points). Do the same for some other players. One needs to look around in data to learn more from it.
Being the GOAT is subjective, it's not just about dry statistics. I'd argue the cultural impact of Diego Maradona was incredidibly more profound than Messi's, ironically much due to his turbulent life off the pitch. People like an anti-hero :)
The 1986 world cup was incredible, the impact of that WC run on the Argentinian national psyche, including the final but especially the Argentina–England game, just cannot be overstated.
Not to be a buzzkill, but being fooled by randomness is a thing that should at least be mentioned here. Of course Taleb has more to say on the matter in [1].
If statistics showing Messi is a great player were just random we'd expect them to regress towards the mean. It's true that as he ages they have a little, but if we compare him to players who are also his age he remains a far outlier.
And even against the world's best, in the a tournament that matters (ie, this world cup) he ended up being the second highest goal scorer, second highest assist giver, highest chance creator and second highest dribble completer[1].
So yes, I'd like to understand how randomness applies here.
I'm not saying it directly applies here, but it's a caveat worth mentioning.
Consider giving a fair coin to 5 random people and asking them to toss it 10 times. The probability that one of them will get 10 heads is 1 - (1 - (1/2^10)) ^ 5, which is less than 0.5%.
However, if you manage to get 10^2 people to toss the coin, the probability of someone getting 10 heads is about 0.10. This number goes to ~1 with about 10000 coin tossers.
Let's say you manage to get 10k people to somehow toss the coin, and one person, say Mr. A gets 10 heads in a row (as mentioned, the probability of this happening is close to 1).
With enough people tossing coins, you are bound to get a Mr. A. Should Mr. A be hailed as having special skills?
No, not really. Mr. A was just lucky. He was in the right place at the right time. The probability of him getting 10 heads in a row is still only 1/2^10. It just so happened that he was the person who got 10 heads out of the 10k people tossing coins.
Bottom line: With large enough sample sizes, even extremely unlikely events are bound to happen.
Let me clarify again: I'm not saying that Messi is Mr. A!
Yes, of course random walks are a thing. But that doesn't mean that skill isn't also a thing.
In an adversarial, high stakes game where there can be only one winner (like sports, but unlike the stock market where there can be multiple winners) differences in skill show up in statistics well.
There are techniques like true score theory[1] that separate skill from luck by looking at variation (which is essentially a way of looking at reversion to mean as I mentioned earlier).
Sustained performance over time when looking at skill-based statistics in sport (eg, passes completed in soccer) is not something where a random walk applies.
> I'm not saying it directly applies here, but it's a caveat worth mentioning.
No, it's not. It's worth mentioning why it doesn't apply here, but by just mentioning it you imply (incorrectly) that it does, which is both misleading an wrong.
The true score theory is trying to decompose an outcome into true ability and random error. My example was about the random error (which definitely applies to sports, I'm not sure why you think it doesn't). I never ruled out the skill/ability.
It's interesting that you are objecting to my argument by referring to the true score theory, which quite literally provides a caveat to attributing skills to the observed outcomes.
> you imply (incorrectly) that it does
Of course it does because sports outcome are random. Randomness is not the only factor, but it certainly is one.
What I mean is that the sport is very different from what it was in the 80s, there was a different set of required skills back then and now.
The amount of fouls and violence that 80's football had was a different level, go watch the Maradona documentary, Diego would get punches in the guts every few minutes and there was no VAR or tv coverage like we do today it was not easy to see and spot.
Would've Messi thrived in such a sport the same way he did in the 2000s, when teams played very different strategies and football, when he would've needed to get immensely stronger phisically and be able to get beating after beating? Those fouls weren't even yellow cards back then, today all of those would be straight reds.
Maradona needed to put on 10 kilograms of muscles in Italy to be able to do well and completely change his play style.
