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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   3502 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 28, 2024

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When will women overtake men in soccer ability?

So right now there is no competition between men and women when it comes to soccer. There are various stories of high school boys annihilating their respective national pro women team. Just type in women's football/soccer compilation and you will see professional female footballers make mistakes that even half decent teenage boys wouldn't make.

However, who's to say this won't change in the far (/near?) future ?

First of all, women's football has only become a sport that has gained serious attention in the last couple of years. I'm sure men were not that good when football was first invented. It will take time for the most talented of female footballers to be found.

Secondly, football is as much as a game of skill and teamwork as a game of strength and speed. Men have an obvious inherent advantage when it comes to strength and speed and I don't see that gap closing anytime soon. But skill and teamwork is something that we don't really understand to the same degree as strength and speed. Strength and speed are easy to measure and they have an almost objective quality to them. Skill and teamwork however, are more nuanced abilities, more hard to measure, more "I know it when I see" type of ability.

My main argument here is that women have advantage over men in terms of social skills mainly because women find people endlessly fascinating. I think their ability to read body language and facial expressions far surpasses men. So much so that I think most men don't even realise how much better they are in this regard. It's akin to a 100 IQ person interacting with a 150 IQ person. The 100 IQ person might think the 150IQ person is a bit weird and may even recognise that the person is smart through socially sanctioned indicators of intelligence such as prestigious university, hard degree, cognitively demanding job. But the 100IQ person doesn't really grasp how vast the inner world of the 150IQ person is compared to theirs. The 100IQ person doesn't grasp how much more information the 150 IQ person is collecting and processing.

Anyway, I believe that women's interest in people could mean their ability to coordinate in soccer is much higher than men's. I think given enough time women will be passing the ball in way we have only seen in glimpses on the men's side. I believe that Barcelona's tiki taka will become the standard template of play for women's football in the future. It might be so good that they will be able to beat men despite the strength and speed gap.

  • -10

To engage seriously with your trolling, there is a common misconception in football that the skillful players, the clever midfielders and the like are less physical than other positions, but it isn't true at all.

30 or 40 years ago you would still have players that could be visibly unfit and still play to a very high level thanks to technical ability and speed of thought, but as more money and science has entered the game, this has largely vanished at the very top level. Now, all the small, skillful players are just as strong, fast, and fit as everyone else. Messi might not have been as tall or visibly muscular as Cristiano Ronaldo, but he was just as quick and indefatigable and knew exactly how to use his strength to hold players off. The great Barcelona midfield of Xavi, Iniesta, and Busquets were all incredible athletes. When Ronaldinho became fat and unfit, his level dropped dramatically from when he was the best in the world, despite the technical skill still being the same.

Probably a troll, but why not discuss seriously anyways?

If we wanted to investigate this theory, soccer doesn't seem like a good place to start. If women really do have social skills and body language and facial expression reading ability so much better than men that it might grant them practical skills, let's pick a game where that's the most important thing and physical ability is meaningless. Poker sounds good to me.

I have no clue offhand how high-end competitive poker works. A few quick searches show World Series of Poker seems to have separate men's and women's leagues. Somebody out there must be running high-end mixed-gender poker games though. If women really are that much better at those things, they ought to be cleaning up at mixed-gender poker tables.

A few quick searches show World Series of Poker seems to have separate men's and women's leagues.

It's similar to chess where most tournaments are open to everyone while some are only open to certain demographics (seniors, women, casino employees, etc.). Also like chess women are greatly underrepresented at the highest levels of the game. And yes, there have been controversies in recent years where clearly male-presenting people have entered and won ladies tournaments and tried to claim they're actually trans women.

My understanding is that elite-level poker hasn't really been about reading people in quite some time. Over long enough time horizons, the autistic math geek who's spent hundreds of hours working out probabilities for various board states is always going to beat a "natural" player who spends their time trying to psych people out and figure out tells.

I don't even think this is a good troll.

If only all our trolls put in this much effort. Thumbs up for that alone.

Well done, I’ll give you an 8/10 for this.

"Gr8 b8 m8. I r8 8/8."

So true. This goes for basketball too, if not more so.

Basketball has become much more of a team-sport in recent years, with elaborate and intricate pick-and-roll schemes. Women, with their better sense of empathy and social skills, should be better at reading defensive coverages and coordinating pick-and-rolls with each other.

This superior ability to read and coordinate carries over to the defensive side, too. Women can better read the offense’s facial expressions and body language, better communicate with their teammates as to who’s-got-who, when to switch, when to stay, when to double. Unlike men and their stupid egos, women are more courageous in being brave enough to ask for help and thus more willing to ask for doubles when they’re needed.

Everyone knows women contribute more emotional and physical labor to housework while men laze around the house or at work. So, in a playoff situation, women have the decisive advantage over men when it comes to sweeping experience.

Women may be shorter and slower than men, but that’s only due to socialization, the height-stunting effects of the patriarchy and internalized misogyny.

As the patriarchy and internalized misogyny lessen, who’s to say women can’t be as tall or fast on average as men or even taller or faster? If women aren’t as tall or as fast as men, that only means we have ways to go in rooting out societal inequities between the two sexes that currently get assigned at birth.

Plus, height can’t be that important in basketball. Stephen Curry is only 6’2,” and there are women out there taller than that. Nor can speed be that important; Jokic lumbers around like a glacier. There have even been successful NBA players that were both short and slow, like Jason Kidd on the championship Mavericks team.

Like Barca’s tiki-taka for women’s football, I believe the Seven-Seconds-or-Less Suns or 2017 Warriors will become the standard template of play for women’s basketball in the near future. Only in right-winged echo chambers like The Motte are people denialists about women being better than men at basketball someday. Unfortunately, these kinds of misogynistic attitudes are not limited to this site—and are in fact ubiquitous througout society—oppressing women and preventing them from being better than men at basketball and other sports. Men and their fragility get so triggered and feel so threatened by the thought of women being better than them at sports.

Never.

When will women overtake men in soccer ability?

This is a ridiculous question. The answer is never. Seriously, it's such a bad question, I felt the need to downvote it.

And it's bad in particular because of the contrived argument you present.

My main argument here is that women have advantage over men in terms of social skills mainly because women find people endlessly fascinating.

Your assertion that women are supposedly better at team coordination because of inherently better social skills, is superficially true, but once again, does not apply to this situation whatsoever. And also it's naive in a really grating way. It's like you read some chapters of a fairly advanced book, but completely skipped other chapters.

Did you skip the chapter on greater male variability? Or the chapter on males having significantly better spatial-temporal reasoning? Or that men have a much higher status-driven competitive drive????

You know, just all the things needed to be the best at a team sport (something something men being hunters women being gatherers) that primarily involves lobbing a projectile at a target, in additional to the greatly male advantaged requirements for physical prowess?

Seriously NO. Just NO.

Nothing is stopping women from dominating esports either by this logic. But they tend to suck balls at it, because few women are autistically driven enough to strive to be the top 0.0001% at anything, or lack the mental fortitude to place winning over everything else (even if it means being mean to your teammates and not having friends or family).

Your model of soccer is wrong, your model of men and women is wrong, your model of competitive endaevours is wrong. Your model of how those things tie in together is wrong.

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