That doesn't make any sense. Athleticism in American football and soccer are entirely different. Most positions in the NFL rely on pure athletics and not a particular skill - it is nothing like soccer. You do not need to be a supreme athlete to be a great soccer player, it is a sport that requires much more skill and knowledge. Many NFL players could be (or in fact were in college) great Track and Field athletes. You are just simply not knowledge of the sport you are critiquing, and it is very painfully obvious.
Many positions in the NFL merely require a person to run or jump - that naturally means raw athleticism is more important than a sport that would require dribbling, vision or precision. Hence why gymnast and wrestlers are great athletes despite them not having the benefits of playing in professional sports. This is not comparable to football (soccer) at all - soccer is more comparable to hockey in those regards.
And there are other sports other than American Football that is popular in the US that are not Olympic sports...USA is not as tunnel visioned on a particular sport as the U.K is. The fact that you seem to think that there are athletes like JJ Watt and Adrian Peterson running around in the Premier league makes me think you really have no idea what you're talking about.
You also have a very arbitrary standard of determining what countries generate elite athlete by limiting it to gold medalist. The fact that you do not see the variables that go in or why that is a weak standard is somewhat alarming. The argument that the UK is better at producing athletes than the USA because it has a better ratio of gold medalist to population is basically surface level logic, it doesn't have much depth at all.
And I still have no idea how you think that not having a lot of athletes tied up in the NFL and NBA does not make a difference - considering those sports rely significantly more on physicality than soccer does.
You literally cannot be an NBA player if you do not have certain measurements, or an NFL player for that matter bar a few positions. More rugby players would transition to the NFL for higher pay if they were all just slow fat guys as you suggest.
Furthermore, if a basketball team has 15 players or so - then they have essentially won 15 gold medals. But naturally that is not how gold medals are counted in official standings. Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant are all clearly Olympic caliber athletes, gold medal caliber athletes at that - yet using your standard they only amount to one gold medal despite being 3 distinct athletes.
I don't live in USA by the way. I do find it funny that Europeans say things like Americans think the world revolves around them, when they are quite blind of their own Euro centrism.
Few points - I would agree that athleticism in American football and real football are different. I’ve never stated otherwise. What I would disagree with is that one is inherently more athletic than the other. One (American football) is much more specialised, with each athlete having a very defined role, but as we’ve seen in plenty of boxing vs MMA debates on here...specialisation doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a better athlete.
You mention specifically that many positions in the NFL only require a person to run or jump - the fastest running speeds clocked by real footballers actually beat their NFL counterparts
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/the1...astest-are-european-or-nfl-players-faster?amp
You talk about my lack of knowledge about American Fatball, but you demonstrate the exact same level of ignorance to the athleticism involved in real football.
I also wasn’t the one that suggested taking Olympic gold medalists as the barometer of elite athletes - had you actually taken the time to read my posts you would realise that I have already stated I disagree with that position. A number of posters supporting the ‘NFL athletes are the best in the world and could beat up Jon Jones’ position stated US Olympic dominance as a demonstration of athletic superiority, until of course it was pointed out to them that there are actually 20 or so countries better at producing Olympic gold calibre athletes than the US.