How would an NFL star fare at the World Cup? We’ve already had the answer

Feature

Robin Bairner | Chief Editor

Accredited football journalist and editor covering the game since 2006

One of the World Cup’s great debates has centred around how a leading American athlete would perform next to one of the superstars performing at the competition.

Social media has been alive with arguments that one of the weaknesses that saw the USA eliminated from the competition at the last 16 phase is because the country’s top athletes focus on other sports.

Soccer remains a comparatively niche pastime in the US, where American football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey dominate the agenda, hoovering up the majority of sporting talent.

But how might these players translate if they were on the soccer field?

Josh Norman’s PSG experience

Of course, this is an impossible question to answer given that they have honed their abilities to an elite level in an entirely different sport, but former ESPN writer Kevin Van Valkenburg gave some insight into the gulf between the top players across the sports.

In particular, he homed in on an experience he had with Washington Redskins cornerback Josh Norman, who was billed as one of the best players in his position across the NFL. He was invited by Zlatan Ibrahimovic to watch a PSG game and had the opportunity to jump into training with the players of the Ligue 1 giants.

Van Valkenburg explained on X: “Josh was an elite NFL corner and a huge soccer fan. He’d played some soccer as a kid too so he wasn’t just a novice.

“It was comical how much the PSG guys had to slow things down to make it fun for him. It was like the scene in Friday Night Lights (the TV show) where the Panthers goof around and pretend to tackle little kids. That’s how elementary they had to make it. The tried to feed Josh to “score” a goal and it was almost condescending how much they had to pretend it was real soccer.”

But he explained that it wasn’t a one-way street.

The journalist continued: “Someone handed us an American football. In one of the most surreal experiences of my life, I spent 15 mins throwing passes to PSG players. It was equally comical. Honestly I’ve seen something as ridiculous as David Luiz trying to catch an American Football. It didn’t just bounce off his hands, it *exploded* off his hands.

“At some point, the skills do not translate. You would need to live it from a young age. Americans love to tell themselves they could be good at soccer if they only cared.”

The conclusion that Van Valkenburg has drawn is this: “Maybe they’d be better if they started young enough, but I’m not convinced it would be 6-3 WRs and there is no chance it would be LeBron or Kobe or anyone 6-8.

“Either way, plugging ‘athletes’ in and arrogantly assuming they’d thrive at soccer would never ever work.”

Could a soccer player move in the other direction, though?

Harry Kane’s NFL dream

It’s a possibility that England striker Harry Kane has admitted that he’s committed to exploring when his days at the top of the game are over.

“Of course, there's a lot of technically very gifted players and in NFL kicking, a lot of players can kick it far and high, but I guess it all comes down to who can handle the pressure the best and I feel like the more I watch it, the more I see that, you know, in the big situations,” he told NFL UK (via ESPN).

“A lot of times the game goes down to a last minute field goal, last second field goal. So I'd like to think kind my experience of dealing with that in soccer would put me maybe at an advantage compared to some of the other guys who haven't had that experience, maybe coming out of college or things like that.”

And there is a precedent that Kane could follow.

Dallas Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey was a first round pick in the MLS SuperDraft of 2017 for Toronto FC. He would not make an appearance for the first team, but he did play professionally in the USL – the level below MLS – for two seasons, making 47 appearances before switching to American football in 2022, four years after quitting soccer.

Aubrey is now the best-paid kicker in NFL, having signed a contract worth $28m over four years.

Kane can therefore hold out some hope that his NFL dream might yet become a reality, though even of one of the deadliest strikers of a soccer ball, it remains a longshot.