Nobody in soccer can seriously be considered for the best athlete in the world...especially based on
speed, LMFAO. It's a
heavily skill-dominant sport due to the nature of the fact every player is required to be competent at handling the ball, and the ball is managed with the feet. Mainly, they simply aren't big enough. The TS doesn't want to bring that up, but I do. Why? It's an unavoidably essential factor to the overall equation. It's one of the principal reasons that men tend to dominate women in sport, and this can't be reduced to differences in absolute strength alone. It's way more complicated than that.
Simple: a 150 pound man who runs a 10.0s 100m dash is not the athletic equal to a 250 pound man who runs a 10.0s 100m dash.
It's why, for example, using the ultimate Joe Rogan litmus test for the legitimacy & hierarchy of sport, those guys would all be hopeless weight class fighters. You see fights break out on blacktops all the time, but nowhere is a random cricket match breaking out in a friendly sparring session or wrestling mat. Weight class fighters = handicap fighers = smaller men = pretty much all the top talent in world soccer.
The guys in the NBA and NFL are significantly superior in terms of acceleration and top speed while being nearly (or literally) twice as large, and those in the former are putting out ~2.0-2.5 miles on average in a game (with an average of ~4.2mph during gametime which roughly equals the average for Premier League players if we set the avg gametimes of soccer at 100min rather than the literal clock of 90min, or the typical 105min-120min of actual gametime yielded). It's not like they lack meaningful endurance, and they repeat bursts of speed with much greater frequency than the soccer players which won't show up in mean velocities.
Even more impressive is their dominance in a vertical plane against elite soccer players who actually have
below average vertical leaps (as in: below average versus untrained subjects). The study I saw of elite Dutch players, IIRC, recorded an average 18" vert for these top tier pros.
If we're going to ignore the tremendous size and dimensional advantage of the top athletes in the most athletic positions of the NBA or NFL, then I'll take Ashton: