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Slimebeast on 02 July 2016
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Ka-pi96 said:
Slimebeast said:

But if Uruguay, Chile and Argentina can be producing elite talent year after year, why not other countries with similar economies, size of population and interest in football? Like Colombia, Peru, Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Iran, Tunisia, Saudi-Arabia, Algeria, Marocco, Egypt, South Africa and Turkey.

And if you consider how damn talented black players are genetically (in France, Belgium, England, Portugal and Holland the black population is only 1-2% but they make up 20-30% of all the professional football players) one would think that at least a couple of Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast and Cameroon would take steps like Brazil and Mexico did as poor nations in the past and join the elite of world football.

And moneywise, the national teams of countries like USA, Japan, Korea, India and China are performing much worse compared with how much money there are in their domestic leagues.

But no, it's all about Europe.

I'd say Colombia have produced some good talent in recent years though, Peru not so much, but Colombia have. Although it is worth noting that the economy in Colombia/Peru is a fair bit worse off than in Argentina or Uruguay.

As for the others, are they really as interested in football as the top European/South American countries? I don't think so. Australians and South Africans would rather play Rugby or Cricket. The Chinese are usually one of the top olympic medal earners so it's obvious where their top atheletes are going (although with all the investment they currently putting in to football who knows how that could change things for their national team in the long term). India is obsessed with cricket, if they liked football as much as they did cricket then they'd have a good team, but they don't. Japan & Korea prefer to play baseball rather than football. There have been some great players of Moroccan/Algerian origin (they just usually end up playing for France ). Egypt and Tunisia are significantly poorer than the top South American countries, their economies are actually at a similar level to Peru. As for Saudi I'd assume there just isn't as much interest there as elsewhere. It seems most of the Arab investment in football is coming from the significantly smaller UAE or Qatar rather than Saudi.

For a lot of African countries there just isn't the infrastructure there for a lot of players. Brazil may have been a fairly poor country when they rose to the elite but they did have a top league. No African countries really have that. It seems a lot of the money invested in African youth football is from European teams so the African players often end up eligible to play for a European country as well after moving there at a young age. Although there have been times where it looked like an African country could emerge as a great footballing nation, so maybe it will happen sooner or later.

As for Turkey... that's harder to explain. Maybe it's the fault of Germany stealing all the good Turkish footballers though

Interesting detailed reply. So with all these nations it's just not really there. It's either the national economy inhibiting the development (Africa, Peru, Colombia) or it's a lack of interest (Asia, Saudi). While I've heard that they're crazy about watching the World Cup in all over Asia, it simply doesn't seem to generate enough kids to start playing football for real. And I forgot about that damn Asutralian rules football and rugby which naturally hampers their football culture.

It's cool that you at least agree that Turkey underperforms relative to its potential. I read an article before the Euro Cup where when speaking of all the players in the Turkish team that have been educated in Germany and Holland, a Turkish coach was very self critical and said that the Turkish football culture and their youth system in particular is severely lacking. He said that if a young Lionel Messi had been turkish, they would have seen him as a "weak dwarf". But that they're now planning to invest in more football academies.