How Soccer is Reshaping the NFL
Like most athletes growing up, Ndamukong Suh studied his heroes.
He learned footwork from one of his idols. What Suh gleaned were subtle but brilliant moves—like how to use your feet to fake twice, in quick succession, like you‘re headed one way, before going the other.
“It helped me so much,” the star Detroit Lions pass rusher said.
But it wasn’t an American football player Suh was watching. It was Thierry Henry , who starred for European soccer giants Arsenal and Barcelona.
If you ask NFL scouts and decision makers what’s changing among the league’s younger standouts, it’s a different type of athleticism. That can be attributed, in part, to soccer. Those inside the game say that a young core of stars, all rooted in the beautiful game, have brought a new dimension to the NFL.
As New York Giants rookie Odell Beckham Jr. has become one of the league’s top wide receivers this season—both because of his statistics and his otherworldly one-handed catch last month against the Dallas Cowboys—he has given credit to his soccer upbringing. He said that as a teenager, he was considered a top soccer prospect. (He recently speculated he would have turned into a Cristiano Ronaldo -type of player, which may be pushing it.)
Eventually he chose football. But his foundation in both sports confirmed that if you’re going to play another sport these days, it ought to be soccer.
“I think it just helps you with your footwork and conditioning,” Beckham said. “Soccer is a sport where you are running back and forth every part of the game.”
Ghana native Ezekiel Ansah, another talented Lions defensive lineman, excelled at soccer and didn’t play football until after he went to Brigham Young. The 25-year-old Ansah is 6 feet 6 and over 270 pounds, but ran a 4.6-second 40-yard dash at last year’s pre-draft combine, a blazing time for his size.
Suh, who is 6 feet 4 and 305 pounds, physically outgrew soccer. But in his youth, he was famous for his ability to score off corner kicks and his “banana” kick, which goes over and then dips behind a bewildered goalkeeper. Suh still demonstrates it in pickup games and in football warm-ups.
That isn’t uncommon among NFL players who played soccer growing up. Video of Beckham showing off his skills during warm-ups emerged recently, including using the football for a “rainbow” kick, in which he flips the ball from behind him over his head.
Players say that aside from footwork, soccer helped their ability to understand movement on the field. In soccer, they had to continuously work in concert with teammates over a large space—as opposed to the brief bursts of action in football—and they developed an intuition about where teammates would go. This can come in handy both on offense and defense.
Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck grew up on soccer while living abroad. While his father, former Houston Oilers quarterback Oliver Luck, worked as a sports executive in England and Germany, Andrew was a skilled midfielder—one who was learning how to play quarterback by setting up others on the soccer field.
“Throwing the ball is all about angles. To see the angles and take advantage of the angles. Soccer is great for that,” Oliver Luck said. “I’m a big believer that football players, particularly quarterbacks, need to play more than football, even if they aren’t that good at the other sport.”
Luck’s former Stanford teammate, Philadelphia Eagles tight end Zach Ertz, said that Luck was so good, he almost single-handedly helped a ragtag group of football players beat members of the Stanford women’s soccer team in a pickup game. He added that Luck’s understanding of how to approach passing in soccer has undoubtedly carried over to the football field, where he’s often scrambling and improvising.
“It’s a great sport to start out with before football because you get a lot of fitness from it, then the coordination, and it’s a lot more physical sport than people give it credit for,” said New England Patriots kicker Stephen Gostkowski.
Although the NFL has plucked countless soccer players to be place-kickers over the years, Gostkowski said that a soccer background is more important than ever today, since kickers have to kick faster than ever to avoid a block. He said that soccer players have an advantage if a snap isn’t perfect—something that can make other kickers fall apart. “It’s about little adjustments with your feet, in a time of a split-second,” Gostkowski said. “In soccer, you learn if the pass isn’t right on the money or you take a bad touch, you still have to get a shot off.”
The infusion of NFL players reared in that other form of football could change the culture surrounding the game, too. The Giants’ Beckham has begun borrowing an idea from soccer: After games, he swaps jerseys with opponents.
“Soccer was my first sport,” Beckham said.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
