Because football is far and away the biggest sport in Portugal. Even a relatively small country of 10 million people is going to produce plenty of sporting talent, and the cream of that talent will end up playing football because that’s where both the money and the glory is. Same deal with rugby in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Soccer in USA is quite a bit down the pecking order in both prestige and money, especially as a career likely means moving thousands of miles to play in Europe.
We can agree to disagree … we don’t need to argue, though. Let’s just play this out a bit … I’m curious.
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Is it a chicken/egg thing? What comes first … the athletes pouring into a sport? Or the development system?
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As far the height thing regarding NBA players … that just not true. Sure, players like Shaq (7’2” / 2.184m) and Kevin Durant (6’11” / 2.1m) are incredibly tall … but Zlatan Ibrahimović is 6’5” / 1.95m and Christian Ronaldo is 6’2” / 1.88m tall. Erling Haaland is 6’4” Do you know how many apex-level athletes are in the NBA between those sizes? Hundreds. The average height of an NBA player is 6’6” (coincidentally the same height as Michael Jordan)
I don’t know … it’s a combination of both, I think. As always, in an interesting question because the answer is unknowable.
I just don’t think us soccer has an athlete problem, it’s a huge country with top level athletes in every sport, and there’s no participation problem as far as I can tell, tons of kids play youth soccer, it’s just widely recognized that development is still way behind what they do in Europe. It’s no surprise a lot of the national players grew up in Germany and what not, better coaching
Regarding the OP’s question, I found these two articles after a quick search which may be of interest:
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I think there’s plenty of discussion of the genetic angle when the athletes do seem to have a genetic difference. Jamaican sprinting, East Africa distance running, Pacific Island rugby, etc. Maybe closest thing in cycling is South Americans from high altitude regions. Notable in these cases how many athletes with that genetic heritage end up representing other countries in those sports, suggesting it really is nature more than nurture. E.g. in the UK most of our top sprinters have Caribbean heritage, our most successful distance runner emigrated here from Somalia as a child, anything up to about a third of our national rugby team in recent years have Pacific Island heritage despite overall very low numbers of Pacific Islanders living here. Just don’t think it’s likely to be a factor when comparing two neighbouring countries with likely very similar genetic make-up like Belgium and Netherlands.
As a Belgian, we’re definitely behind with regards to the development of female riders (in CX, on the road, mtb,…) but we’re starting to get very talented young girls now (aged 16-18) with one of my friends’ sister being one of them.
I think some of it is the fact that in the Netherlands they started stimulating girls to start riding competitively years ago already (generation of Worst, Alvarado and now Van Empel and Pieterse) and they organized training days to put them all up against eachother. That way they could push eachother to a higher level by being paired up in training regularly. In Belgium there is/was much more of a mentality to do things on their own. We had Cant winning every national and WC CX title for years, with a promising Laura Verdonschot at the time, Jolien D’hoore doing well on the track and road so likely the Belgian federation wasn’t too fussed about it. We had Githa Michiels for years now already in mtb although she was not really close to the top pro’s, but mtb really doesn’t get enough attention here even though it’s practiced a lot due to living near the Ardennes and so on.
Part of what I think might help is that ice skating is SUPER popular in the Netherlands, a lot of girls do it competitively from a young age. And what do those girls mostly do during Spring and Summer? Exactly, ride road bikes. A lot of them already have good endurance and explosive power, so when they enter races to give it a try, a lot of them are succesful right away (perhaps Vollering being the most well known talent now).
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because Annemiek 