If your stats are correct than being in the top 1% of cricket players is harder than being in the top 1% of football players. To be 'superb' at something, you have to be better than others, there's no way to judge performance without competition. It's always relative.
As an extreme example, if only 1 person competes in a sport, then he's the best. It doesn't mean much though. Now imagine coming first in a sport in which 100.000 people compete. Surely that's harder to do, regardless of which sports you take.
yeah but you can't compare sports like that, you need basicly only ball to train soccer (and ofc some coaching), because it's not complicated sport;
you can't learn martial arts by yourself, you need good trainers or coaches, so it's not only about numbers of people who train some sport.
what will be harder? being top soccer player or polo player? acces to one discipline is basicly unlimited, 2nd is sport of elites because you need horse and a lot of money to train it;
same with mma and soccer; how many coaches do you need to properly train mma? few at least;
there's reason why american are not succesfull soccer players, its middle sport class in USA, and you need money to train soccer, when in other countries it's cheap and for ghetto people;
so in my opinion it's very hard to say where competiotion is really tougher, I would say mma is officially trained by 5000 people who are offcially fighters, and we got like 500 mln people doing soccer, so what? being world champion in soccer will be 100.000 harder than being champion in mma? numbers are not everything ...process of forming elite fighters is way more complicated than making elite soccer player and even elite soccer players are often technically very flawed (Aubameyang my favourite example) and often relies on speed than some technique, and when speed is gone they often are not that good anymore (Owen, Rooney), same will happen to Mbappe.
At the end of the day how many people are gifted enough physically to be HW champion of the world (boxing or mma)? Not many, so it's not even about numbers, at start you can eliminate 99% of people from HW talent pool,so how exactly it's easy for avarge Joe to be HW champion - it's f..ing almost impossible.
Soccer is game where you can be 5'6'' and still very succesfull, because rules will protect you. 5'6'' can be only be succesfull in fighting because they invented weight classes, that's why they brainwash people with p4p rnakings - HW champion is best p4p.
At start - ancient greece - there was only one weigthclass - open. So for most of history combat sports were limited to biggest and baddest and able to fight. and talent of pool is very limited for that, doesn't mean it's very easy to be champ in combat sports.