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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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

Never.