By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
HomokHarcos on 07 July 2018
Edit Thread
Ka-pi96 said:
HomokHarcos said:

He's a sports economist.

I'm hoping Brazil can rebound. They certainly haven't had the squad like the Ronaldo era yet again. Really they send players all over the world, so they should always be a contender.

He explained China too with something he calls the middle performance trap. If you know what the middle income trap is, it's when a poor increases it's standard of living quickly to become much middle income, but then gets stuck and can't reach high standards of living. He thinks the same thing happens with marginal footballing countries. Look at the USA and Japan. In the 1990s after the founding of the J. League and MLS, both went from not even qualifying for a World Cup to regularly making the Round of 16, but then they both get stuck there and stagnate. A similar thing will probably happen for China. He predicted that I felt a new contender emerges it will be what he called the core: Western Europe (and that already happened with Belgium).

I'm probably way too invested in this.

I've no idea what a sports economist even is

I really don't buy that "middle performance trap" theory. I think it's just oversimplifying football. The US and Japan aren't as good as European or south American teams largely because they don't like football as much. They prefer other sports ahead of football, and while that doesn't mean they can't be a top football country as well, the sheer number of more popular sports in the US or the margin of the difference in Japan it certainly means there are less potentially top quality athletes going into football than there could be if it were more popular. That's also why China may far exceed either of them when they improve. Not only does China have a much larger population than either to better deal with competition from other sports, but there also isn't as much competition as in the US or Japan in the first place. This is a big if still, but if they do get really passionate about football then they will surely become a major power in the game.

I saw an interesting article that was something to do with that about Uruguay recently. They may not ever be one of the absolute favourites for the World Cup, but they are regularly seen as a dark horse contender, that's despite them being a small country with a tiny population. They're just so passionate about football, it's much more than just a game to them, and that's why they continue to produce top quality players despite being so small. It's for that reason that I think there will always be south American countries in with a shout of winning the World Cup. They may not win it as often as European teams, with how many more European teams there are that's quite reasonable, but they'll always be some contenders from there, and relatively speaking they are still way more successful in the World Cup than European teams (9 WCs for only 10 CONMEBOL nations, compared to 12 WCs for UEFA's 55 nations).

Thanks for the article I really enjoyed it. 😁 I understand that football culture is the main thing that determines how successful a national team is, but that makes me wonder why Turkey doesn't do better internationally. South America doesn't have as much depth as Europe youth, the only time a team other than Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay made a Wirld Cup semifinal was when Chile hosted in 1962.

An advantage China has over the USA is that it doesn't have to compete with as many other team sports as the USA, but the USA's advantage is that it has a much bigger domestic sporting culture than China. China's leader Xi Jiping has made Football a coarse in school and he seems very committed, but I don't future Chinese leaders will follow in his footsteps. It will be interesting to see where they actually are in 2050.