>But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.
As another commenter has pointed out, this is a more comforting and maybe also more realistic stance when it comes to professional/scientific achievement. Unfortunately, however, early specialisation is definitely the rule nowadays in professional football ("soccer"). I'm assuming it's the same for Basketball/Football/Baseball/... in the US and elsewhere.
Pretty much every player who's playing in the top leagues now grew up in an academy, where their education and social lives revolved around their football practice routine, not the other way around. That is not only the top leagues like Premier League or La Liga, but also the leagues that come below it. Players like Brinkmann, Scholl, Bernd Schneider, ... are celebrated as the exception to the rule.
I used to "play" in the fifth league in Germany (Oberliga BaWü) for 2 seasons (barely got any time on the pitch) and even there, almost every player was in some sort of specialised training since they were 5 or 6, either in the youth programmes of local clubs or private academies their parents paid a lot of money for. Everyone is dreaming of playing in the Bundesliga and the academy owners know that. Players coming from a different sport later in their childhood were the exception.
> He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.
As for sports, he argues that individual sports like golf can be mastered through deliberate practice (ex. Tiger Woods), because there are a minimal, defined set of actions that need to happen. So you should go hit your 9-iron 10k times to get better.
However, with complex team sports like soccer, it’s a mix. For set plays and fitness you should use deliberate practice. But for the rest of the game you need creativity because the number of combinations of player sizes, speed and positioning quickly approaches infinity. And creativity can come from similar sports like basketball, or by playing full games against a wider variety of opponents.
And it seems akin to linguistics where the breakthroughs came not by breaking language down into discreet rules but by broadening the knowledge base.
You see this in MMA too where fighters will use deliberate practice for a specific punch or submission, but then will dramatically alter their training camps (often learning new techniques for the first time) depending on their opponent.
I wonder what the quality would be if football was not the hoover of European childhood athletic talent it currently is. Plenty of sportsmen in other fields played football as children and went onto success in other sports. Maybe if basketball was the predominant sport of young boys would we still have Messi and Ronaldo?
The opposite is true in the US. Parents treat soccer as a youth pastime and funnel kids towards basketball, football and baseball for high school and college.
Then the question becomes: Would LeBron or Patrick Mahomes be elite soccer players if they were raised in Europe?
My guess is yes. Their body composition would be different by following different fitness goals but I think there’s a combination of strength, balance, vision, endurance, leadership, decision making and determination that is highly translatable across team sports.
From the anecdata of professional athletes I'm aware of (NBA/NFL) there isn't really an "academy". And these folks weren't specialized at 5-6 years of age. They were extremely athletic and invested a lot of time in the teenage years when they showed promise.
Pro football/basketball are more about raw athleticism than technical ability. The guy who is super technically gifted and who has been training his entire life but not super athletic will either get bent in half by much larger, stronger players and have to retire due to injuries, or just be shut down by a genetic freak who took up the sport in high school
If you are further interested, check out the difference in player development in basketball between Europe and US. In EU there is much more focus on the systems and team play from the early age, whereas in US, as soon as someone shows promise, everything starts to revolve around them.
> Pretty much every player who's playing in the top leagues now grew up in an academy, where their education and social lives revolved around their football practice routine
The argument would only apply to star soccer players. Sure, lots of parents are talked into signing their kids up for pricey training when they're as young as 6. But if you check out big names like Messi, Iniesta, and Cristiano Ronaldo, they didn't hit the academy scene until they were almost teens, right before getting picked for major under-15 club teams. It looks more like you've got to go to an academy to get noticed, not that spending more time in one boosts your chances of making it big.
> The argument would only apply to star soccer players.
What do you mean by star players? If you're talking Big Five + MLS players, then you pretty much either need to be an academy or high level club (ECNL in USA for example) at a young age to have a chance.
Iniesta was part of La Masia, the youth academy for FC Barcelona. Messi/CR7 both played for the youth clubs of professional teams.
As another commenter has pointed out, this is a more comforting and maybe also more realistic stance when it comes to professional/scientific achievement. Unfortunately, however, early specialisation is definitely the rule nowadays in professional football ("soccer"). I'm assuming it's the same for Basketball/Football/Baseball/... in the US and elsewhere.
Pretty much every player who's playing in the top leagues now grew up in an academy, where their education and social lives revolved around their football practice routine, not the other way around. That is not only the top leagues like Premier League or La Liga, but also the leagues that come below it. Players like Brinkmann, Scholl, Bernd Schneider, ... are celebrated as the exception to the rule.
I used to "play" in the fifth league in Germany (Oberliga BaWü) for 2 seasons (barely got any time on the pitch) and even there, almost every player was in some sort of specialised training since they were 5 or 6, either in the youth programmes of local clubs or private academies their parents paid a lot of money for. Everyone is dreaming of playing in the Bundesliga and the academy owners know that. Players coming from a different sport later in their childhood were the exception.