As you point out, soccer is unique in that the skills needed to play at a high level (moving the ball with your feet) require years to develop ... 1,000's of touches, but if these freak athletes devoted the same amount of time in the school yard, parks, organized training, etc., to develop those skills then there is no reason our current crop of profession football, baseball and hockey players would not excel at soccer because their weight training would simply move from building mass needed for football to building leaner muscles needed for soccer.
You sound like a really smart guy, but you are incorrectly assuming freak abilities transfers to soccer, and soccer is a unique sport precisely because athletic ability from other sports doesn’t transfer so easily to soccer.
What makes the NBA athletes freaks? Their size, length and explosiveness. If you look at the dimensions of top basketball players, their arms and legs are longer. NBA athletes, if they played soccer, would have huge strides. But when dribbling with the ball, huge strides are actually a minus, it’s the ability to run with the ball in tight spaces that makes a good dribbler, and the body dimensions required for tight dribbling skills are different than the body dimensions of NBA players. Most great dribblers have shorter legs and run with high knees so they can use their knee-elbow combo to shield the ball and hit the ball high to low to put backspin on it. It’s a highly inefficient running style and uses tremendous energy and creates a different type of muscular development. Soccer players legs look different than basketball players legs. It is also for this reason that taller players rarely dribble. Carrying extra weight and running in the inefficient soccer dribbling style takes too much out of the bigger player.
How many great basketball players are 6’1”? Very few. How many great soccer players are 6’1” or shorter? So many, practically all of them, and it seems like Jose Mourinho wants to collect all of the players taller than 6’1” on Manchester United.
There are probably some point guards in the NBA that could have been great soccer players, but guys like LeBron could only play the 3, 4 or target 9.
The same goes for NFL players. There is no distance running in the NFL. Its all short sprints followed by rest. There is no rest for a soccer player. You are either sprinting or jogging into position to sprint again. The NFL is loaded with fast twitch players, guys who are capable of extremely fast sprints but then require a rest to recover their fast twitch muscles. In contrast, scientific studies have shown that soccer is the ONLY team sport where the athletes have less fast twitch muscle than the average man on the street. Basically, soccer is loaded with the subset of humans who are fast without excessive fast twitch muscle. I would guess some NFL cornerbacks could be pretty good soccer players, but most would not come anywhere close to being able to run the full 90 minutes, so I actually believe most NFL players would not cut it as soccer players except as a 9, because nobody expects a 9 to play a full game because once their sprint speed slows down they get subbed out. International soccer allows 3 subs but in practice it’s really 2 subs plus the 9 because once a 9 gets tired he can’t score. I don’t think it’s coincidence that Lukaku stopped scoring for Man U. when Mourinho failed to sub him out for 10+ straight games.
The money argument is sound. All of these freak athletes, especially the millions of disadvantaged kids ignore soccer as a sport because it doesn't represent the opportunity to hit the lottery that football, baseball, basketball and hockey do. What would happen if just 20% of these freak athletes focused on soccer, rather than football?
I’ve already told you, what makes NBA and NFL freaks, length, size and loads of fast twitch just doesn’t translate to soccer. And there is plenty of money in soccer. The top soccer players are making assloads of cash. Off the field marketing for soccer is greater than any other sport because it is the most popular sport in the world. I’m pretty sure C. Ronaldo makes more money off the field in terms of endorsements than any other athlete.
I really think what makes great players is someone with athletic ability, a good balance of fast twitch and slow twitch muscles, reasonable size (not small but don’t have to be a giant), and love for the game. You have to love the game to do the countless hours of practice and drilling to be great, and you have to love the game to watch countless hours of games to develop your soccer IQ. There are a lot of NFL and NBA players who don’t love their game, watch zero film on their own, but it doesn’t matter because of their athletic freakishness. That never happens in soccer. The best players are always the guys that played all the time.
Time will tell. Frankly, the men's game is faster but very boring when they constantly loose. My family and friends would rather watch a winning game than a boring one