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Bigger star in South Florida: Toney or Messi?

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canes732 said:
It can’t ever be elite in America because it is the 5th most popular sport here. All our best athletes go to football basketball baseball or hockey and I’ll even throw in wrestling. Don’t get me wrong I love watching the World Cup but soccer is pretty boring tbh
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This argument doesn’t hold much weight considering how many more people play soccer than hockey.

There aren’t even a 750k ice hockey players in America; when considering youth alone, that number is at 400k.
 
cookies said:
This argument doesn’t hold much weight considering how many more people play soccer than hockey.

There aren’t even a 750k ice hockey players in America; when considering youth alone, that number is at 400k.
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Less people play hockey worldwide. Soccer is more competitive because every country around the world (besides us) really cares about it.

Most people who play soccer here stop playing around the same time they stop watching Paw Patrol.
 
DMoney said:
Less people play hockey worldwide. Soccer is more competitive because every country around the world (besides us) really cares about it.

Most people who play soccer here stop playing around the same time they stop watching Paw Patrol.
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Yeup, that’s part of it; but we still have quite a bit of infrastructure invested into caring: 43k+ players are in MLS-Next/elite academies alone, then there are 9500+ d1 soccer players with a large portion of them being Americans.

Some of our top players were brought up in overseas academies: Dest, Tillman, Robinson, and Balogun. But the academies produced the rest like Tyler Adams, Christian Pulisic, Joe Scally, Chris Richards, etc.

Alex Freeman — who attended American Heritage — didn’t make Inter Miami, was convinced to tryout for Orlando FC by his Weston FC coach, and became a starter for this world’s cup team at 21 whilst being the youngest player on the team.

We don’t need that large of a populations slice to care; as we see with baseball’s dwindling participation numbers yet still maintaining to produce pros—the USA is many times larger than these other nations. A lot more people care about football than actually play it in America.

We have more players playing in big 5 euro leagues than ever before, more players transferring to ancillary better leagues in Portugal and elsewhere, but there’s no on/off switch for the catching up required. We are trending in the right direction albeit not optimized—but no youth sporting system is.
 
DMoney said:
Less people play hockey worldwide. Soccer is more competitive because every country around the world (besides us) really cares about it.

Most people who play soccer here stop playing around the same time they stop watching Paw Patrol.
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This is the big issue. I grew up playing soccer and the dissconnect that happens after the age of about 13 is real. Youth soccer is actually huge in America. But after that the kids seem to stray away.
 
DMoney said:
Less people play hockey worldwide. Soccer is more competitive because every country around the world (besides us) really cares about it.

Most people who play soccer here stop playing around the same time they stop watching Paw Patrol.
Click to expand...

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I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, it all depends on what neighborhood you’re in. There’s neighborhoods in Miami where messi is the biggest star. And there are neighborhoods where it’s Malachi. Just depends on the neighborhood. But I would wager to guess that there’s more neighborhoods in Malachi’s favor, versus Messi.
 
NicKane said:
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, it all depends on what neighborhood you’re in. There’s neighborhoods in Miami where messi is the biggest star. And there are neighborhoods where it’s Malachi. Just depends on the neighborhood. But I would wager to guess that there’s more neighborhoods in Malachi’s favor, versus Messi.
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I'll venture to say that in most neighborhoods, messi can remain relatively anonymous./
 
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