Welcome to Stars Matter, a recruiting podcast from the athletic.

I'm Mitch Light, joined by Ari Wasserman.

All right, should we talk soccer recruiting, soccer, or college football recruiting?

What do you think?

If they took every single five-star athlete in this country in both basketball and football,

and those players grew up loving the game of soccer instead of football and basketball,

we would undeniably be the best country in soccer without question, right?

Could you imagine like a soccer game with LeBron and, you know, some of those guys out there playing soccer, like our best athletes?

Is that your soccer take of the day?

I mean, I don't know.

I don't know anything about soccer.

I just think like the best athletes in our country play football and basketball.

There clearly are far more sports to choose from in the United States than other countries. Yeah. So if we like force them all. I think that's a hot take. I think that's pretty obvious. Like if we condensed all of our athletes into that one sport, we would win everything all the time. It would be like the dream team for basketball,

those worldwide, right?

I don't know if I'd go that far because there's some teams that are really good in soccer,

but I know nothing about soccer. But just imagine LeBron James, like a 6'4-6 dude that weighs 235 pounds

and runs a 4-5-40 playing soccer in his prime.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it'd be pretty good.

Be a good wide receiver.

So let's talk.

My fault, I started us off with some soccer talk.

I knew you'd have some takes.

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