"says a lot about..." Have you considered running for office? You'd fit right in.

Thank you also for appealing to the origins of the debate as some odd mental-gymnastic proof that your argument has merit when mine doesn't. Links and everything.

Thank you again (third? fourth time?) for making assumptions about my understanding of soccer. Again, stick with the debate points. If the parameters of the debate to determine overall athleticism are the specific events of, oh, a decathlon, then in those events, I submit that BASED ON THE TYPE OF SKILL AN ELITE LEVEL AT THE SPORT REQUIRES, the only events a soccer player would possibly have an advantage ARE, BY DEFINITION, the ones in which the athlete RUNS IN A STRAIGHT LINE.

Your argument regarding the respective sizes of talent pools does you no favors here. To be elite at either sport, one must be elite athletically. It doesn't matter how many more guys a Barca player had to beat out to get to where he is than a Knicks player had to beat out to get to where he is. They're both elite at the facets of athleticism that their respective sport requires of them.

Just because Mr. Hotspur has to beat out more dudes to land his spot than Mr. Spur does, that in no way means that the Tottenham hero can hold a CANDLE to the San Antonian in throwing something, or even jumping while or at the end of running, and because they ARE both world-class athletes, the soccer player wouldn't beat the basketball player by so much in the running events that the upper-body events wouldn't MORE than make up the difference.

You've used a lot of logical fallacies (okay, just a few, but you've used them a lot of times), but none of them do anything to show that, in a widely recognized contest to determine overall-athleticism like a decathlon, the skills required to make a soccer player elite would give him ANY advantage over a basketball player. I submit that remains the case COMPLETELY without regard to my "admiration" for the great sport of soccer.