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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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