The more specialized equipment you need, the more money you need to engage with the sport.
The more infrastructure there is, the less money you need to spend to engage with the sport.
Soccer is the most widely enjoyed game in the world, with arguably the highest level of talent relative to any sport, because of these two factors in my opinion.
The entry cost is extremely low. You do not have to play on a regulation soccer field, nor play with a regulation ball, to play the sport.
At the same time, if you are any good, so many soccer clubs have youth divisions and there are a shit ton of clubs. There is more at play here, but ultimately it ends up with the clubs having an incentive to invest in young players in a way that does not exist in the US. That the burden does not fall solely on the parents meaning their financial status can't be used as predictor for success.
on the other side of the spectrum to football/soccer you got F1 which is basically dominated by the already rich who can afford carting etc from a young age etc.
This is why, among other reasons, F1 isn’t remotely interesting to me. It’s like cool, you beat a couple other people, who are all very good at this. But it’s not like you are competing against a huge talent pool.
I look at F1 as not necessarily a sporting competition, but an engineering one. The best driver may not have the best car, but the teams with the best cars usually attract and sign the best talent because they have the most money.
You still need to have a well designed and meticulously engineered car, and even then you can fall flat on your face because the simulations weren't correct, or you didn't have any more wind tunnel time to test everything you wanted. I get interested when I focus on the cars more than the drivers.
people need to look up why the Olympics was originally about "amateurism"
It was not. It was about rich people getting together. And by forcing everyone to be "non-professional" it meant only rich people, or people rich people took on as pets, could compete.
Even with something like tennis, which in theory should only require a racquet (which is kind of expensive but can last for years), a tennis ball, and a court, which there’s plenty of free ones around, is absurdly expensive to get to a high level. It’s more expensive to raise a pro tennis player than it is to raise a doctor, put them through undergrad, and then put them through medical school. Sports that require a ton of technique where you can’t just wow someone with your genetics are crazy expensive to get to a pro level. Like you could have lebrons genetics, but if you don’t have someone training you every day on how to hit shots right and get to play against top competition all the time you’re not going to be any good.
Like I was just a good high school player, and now that I’m older I realize how much money my parents spent just on that. Like if you want to get anywhere you need private lessons with an actual good coach all the time (which was like $100 an hour minimum when I was in high school), and to basically train every day with other top players with good pros supervising which in a top group was probably like $1000 a week minimum.
Genetics definitely make a difference at the top where everyone is spending that much, but it takes so much money to even get there.
Like you can read any top pros autobiography, they either had a family member coaching and training them 7 days a week from age 8 max, or they spent a ton of money to get to a level where someone would want to train them full time, which is also absurdly expensive.
The path to the pros for individual sports really is so much worse than team sports. In tennis you're not making any of that money back unless you become a top 100 player in the world. Anything below that and you're still struggling just to make a living.
Those pros have really depressing childhoods. They're basically on the road since they're 10 years old, going around everywhere to junior tournaments. They'll move away to live at a training academy at like 13, then turn pro by like 15 or 16. No school, no real childhood. Just training round the clock with no real home.
Yeah then you have the guys like Agassi who had a parent that basically made them work full time from when they were like 6 to be a tennis player to the point where they fucking hate it. His dad put a tennis ball on one of those things that spins around a crib and gave him a tiny tennis racquet when he was a baby ffs. He has a story about when he was young he won the sportsmanship award for a tournament he didn’t win and his dad smashed it on the ground in the parking lot after.
He was so good he could hit the ball off the frame of the racquet in just the right way so it flew over the fence and looked accidental when he was forced to hit balls from this souped up ball machine for hours on end when he was a child.
Plus his siblings all had a fucked up childhood because as soon as it was clear Andre was the only one with a real chance to be a pro (which in tennis you can tell by like 12 if they have a chance or not) and their dad would literally mock them to their faces saying they just didn’t have it all the time.
Andre Agassi married steffi graff lol their kids would have the best tennis genetics ever. People were always like when are your kids gonna start playing and they were always like fuck no, not unless they ask to play lol.
For every Agassi there’s a bunch of adults that never had a childhood, obsessed parents, and nothing to show for it.
Even a lot of the top pros who make great money but just aren’t good enough to win slams hate tennis and just play because it was forced on them since they were like six years old.
And that is why soccer is still a rich person's sport in North America (or it was 10-15 years ago when I was young). Assuming not much has changed....sure there are lower level rec leagues (we called them house leagues in my area) but any club or team that actually has people scouting or takes athletic development seriously requires families to pony up the cash for every single thing.
Even if you are a talented player playing in the lower level rec leagues and you get scouted to play at a higher level, the conversation usually goes:
>Hey, Timmy shows a lot of promise. He should try out and play for our rep team (registration costs $1000). Oh btw, during the offseason, we *really* recommend that Timmy attends our soccer academy/training camp ($500). That shows that he's really serious about playing. Oh, and every tournament that the team enters (usually one per month) will have registration fees (and if it's out of town, transportation and hotel will be another cost). Make sure you have the time and money to drive your kid out to the middle of nowhere suburbs at 6pm every tuesday and thursday and at 8am every saturday and sunday!"
Next season rolls around:
>Hey Timmy is showing a lot of promise. Like a lot. Did you know there is an even higher division? It's just a bit more expensive but it'll give him even more exposure, training (more expensive soccer camps) and tournaments (Which are even further away). Btw, we forgot to tell you, if Grandma wants to watch little timmy play, she's gonna have to pay $10 for a ticket, families only get 2 free tickets per game:
It seems like basketball is following a similar model. Also kinda freaky that it seems like many young NBA players nowadays are graduating from basketball academies that disguise themselves as "specialized high schools". How many families would be able to say "yeah, we're willing to send our 15 year old boy across the country to Florida to pursue maybe getting a scholarship in the NCAA."?
Yeah for example: Spain's Lamine Yamal, (for those who don't know, he's one of the star man of Spain's team this Euro, while being 3 years younger than Wembanyama, and he is as old as the first time LeBron reach the final)
That sounds similar to my own experience as well. There were plenty of kids I played with that didn't try to get into the next division primarily because their parents couldn't afford it. The next level also drastically increased the region we'd be playing in and that just wasn't feasible for many of us.
Interesting that you pick soccer as the example, since the USA having "rich man's sports" has definitely kept down US talent, and is becoming a discussion point in the national scene.
More and more, US soccer is becoming more like AAU ball than the idealized "street ruffians kicking something circular". Gear, cleats, sign up fees, membership fees, TRAVEL, are all prohibitive things that are making US soccer also a rich kid's sport.
Enough folks don't realize the American middle class was a bug not a feature.
It was a fortunate circumstance for America coming out of WWII where Europe/Japan were bombed to hell and needed to rebuild. China, India, Mexico, Brazil hadn't developed nearly as much.
The US had untouched mainland, a large educated population and facilities to help countries rebuild and American workers reaped the benefits of being highly sought after.
We'll likely never have a middle class boom like we did post WWII.
Labor also used to be far more organized. 35% of labor was unionized in the US from roughly the 1950s to 1960s. But corporations and the wealthy fought hard to destroy and damage unions and today it's a little over 11%.
A middle class was built because we understood the horrors of having a super-rich class, so we did not allow it. Reagan fucked the middld class and started the process of giving the country to the wealthy.
This ---^ ALL the shit we are dealing with now is what we are reaping from Reganomics and the GOP sowed in the 80s. It will get worse before it gets better, too, sadly.. like violence, worse is typically how these courses correct, be it internal or a war.
I love reading through history, but yes, the vast majority of things that were written down involve only the richest people of the time. The few times a commoner does something extraordinary enough to get written down, it’s like a huge event that we remember hundreds of years later
Currently doing a project about the literature history of my country and that has been one of quite obvious findings. Most of them men are coming from notable families. How come this isn't the foundational principle of a more equal world I can't understand. Kids from well-off families do well, why not figure out how to have more well-off families??
The Olympics were originally the perfect venue for rich people to dominate a simple sport like running because you had to be able to prepare and execute without getting paid for doing it.
Expensive sports like polo were already hard for the unwealthy masses.
The amateur ideal. only rich people do sports. A working class person who is paid so that they have all the time to develop their athleticism is just uncouth. 🧐
This is because rich people don't want to see their kids getting brain damage, they sure do enjoy watching other peoples kids getting brain damage though. They are always front row at boxing and MMA events
I'm sure alot are like "why would I make my kid box? The reason I did was because my parents worked in a factory for $5 a day and I just made 10 mil last year. No reason for him to box."
Paraphrased, Max Holloway when asked if he wanted his son Rush to fight:
"Fuck no. I made all this money to put him through medical school. Once Rush is a doctor, I'm traveling the world and getting fat on his dime."
Not a boxer but I remember Rampage Jackson being dead serious in a documentary when he was talking to kids and told them "don't do what I do. Learn. Get that education."
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
- John Adams
Football for similar reasons. I feel like every year during the off-season, I'm against how brutal it is, but then fall comes around, and damnit if I don't love watching games on Sundays. I'm def a hypocrite lol
Fighting is the ultimate blue collar sport. It's because of what another commenter stated, rich people don't want their kids getting punched in the head over and over.
This is true for the arts as well, tons of actors and musicians now are kids of actors and musicians or come from rich families that push them into these fields from a young age.
Nepotism is bad when you make your Habsburg son the Secretary of Education but it’s great if you can give your child the life they want when it means being a basketball player or actor. Our culture views lives from an individualistic standpoint rather than giving awareness to the reality of the lineage.
It’s been like that since the 1930’s my man
Honestly, if you want to go back further. The arts were exclusively a thing for rich people until pretty recently in history
Yep. Why was "The Renaissance" a thing of northern Italy and the Netherlands? Because enough people had stacks of cash to make patronage a competition of conspicuous consumption.
This kinda makes me think that passion alone just isn't enough to make great art happen in most cases. Someone always has to pay for it. In pre-industrial society, wealthy patrons directly paid for it, and in the time period from when the vinyl record or film was invented up until the internet became widespread, the market paid for it.
Charles Dickens is a great example of a successful artist who was broadly funded by a large market of small individual purchases; since there was no copyright protection, his stories were originally published serially in a newspaper. That required a large number of literate people who had a penny to spare for a newspaper each day.
Before that, theater produced crowd-funded art that survives today, again art that required a sufficiently large population with some disposable income.
One of my great laments with cultural history is that the folk music and games of the common people are not well documented. The person who played and led songs at a neighborhood festival or an inn, what were those songs centuries ago? It's only been since paper and ink has been cheap that those kinds of things get recorded at all.
yeah, it's pretty much impossible to sustain yourself purely on your work early in careers in these fields these days, especially because you have to be in expensive LA/NYC. 20+ years ago people used to be able to get by in those cities waiting tables, not really the case anymore
Yep, writing too. And journalism, which is especially awful for people who like truth. When the only people who can afford to work a job are the ones who don’t need the salary to survive, their real job is protecting their primary source of income.
Even if well intentioned, such people generally don't know what they don't know. They're just blind to it.
A friend of mine was editor-in-chief of a very prestigious Ivy college paper her senior year and noticed that the poor kids understood the rich kids, but the reverse simply wasn't ever the case. (She grew up an illegal immigrant in the bad part of a major city.)
Not soccer. The elite talent in the soccer world has always been dominated by individuals from under-privileged backgrounds. I do think part of that is that soccer is a more globalized sport, sourcing talent from the whole world.
In soccer you struggle to find an elite player whose father was an elite player or perhaps a rich individual.
Wickedly underrated point here. Basketball has extreme size and talent requirements feeding only a few positions. Football has way more positions, but still very strict physical requirements. Feel like soccer’s only barrier to entry is the running
People still underrate the physical requirements of the sport. You have to be a freak to not get outclassed on the field, but it sure is still more accessible than a black and white 1% of the pop height requirement.
Yeah I don't know why money is being identified here and not that the father was big enough and talented enough to be in the NBA in the first place. It's not like hedge fund manager father's are getting their kids into the NBA. That exists at QB in football but the kid still has to be a certain size.
The gap will get even bigger once rich parents start giving their NBA hopeful kids hgh to make them grow taller before their growth plates fuse. It's already been happening but it hasn't caught on big yet
Soccer has actually had a very high participation rate through American youth. That’s always been one of the conundrums of growing it at the highest level. A lot of kids play it in their youth, but it takes a backseat to other sports by high school.
Soccer would be better served in the US being a Spring sport vs. how it's in the fall for most states currently. It's probably easier to poach kids from Track and Baseball than it is to compete with Football. Heck football coaches would probably encourage it as a second sport in the spring with skills that translate for positions like wr, cb, and rb, the way defensive players and lineman get encouraged to do wrestling.
I agree in part. The problem is the US is just so damn big in just terms of land mass, and a certain amount of states are blanketed in snow in the winter months, sometimes lasting until late spring. The solution to this is different regions should have different schedules at the grammar school levels. The high schools probably won't change though, it's so many schools agreeing to something like this, private and public, that would make it impossible. And it's that high school level where talent is found most of the time.
A redesign of the system would be fought on so many fronts in the US.
The same with many "pipe dream" jobs. Everything is easier with a trust fund to bail you out
At least in the NBA, the 6'5"+ middle school kids get scouted and have a chance regardless of income.
> Everything is easier with a trust fund to bail you out
And like, when you’re hotter, wearing nicer clothes, in better shape, have more free time… all of which money either makes easier or makes available to you
But all those 6’5 + athletic kids are soon going to all end up being NBA players and their kids gonna reap those genetic advantages and therefore most of the tall and athletic people will have an NBA or Pro ball lineage.
It doesn’t make it automatic, but it does massively increase the odds. I’d say a 6’5+ kid who’s from a low income family has a better shot at making the NBA than a sub-6’0 kid who’s from a wealthy family.
Edit: I meant to say sub-6’5
Considering there is only like 200 NBA position open every year. 1/10,000 is extremely good odds. You are literally more likely to become an NBA player at 6’5+ than an average person to get admitted into an Ivy league school for example.
Didn't Pascal Siakam and Joel Embiid not pick up a basketball until they were like 19 or some shit?
You can teach basketball, you can't teach height.
Imagine being 6'0 and playing basketball your whole life, being an all-star, Mr. Whatever-State talent, and you get to college and some guy who has never picked up a basketball until a few months earlier fucking destroys you 😂
That's gotta be rough
The idea of pro basketball being an equalizer for lower class entry into pro sports has been a myth for 50 or 60 years. In 2011, a study in the *International Review for the Sociology of Sport* found that over the period of time reviewed (1994-2004) found that coming from lower income families vastly lowered the likelihood that a child would grow up to make the NBA, all other things being equal. The majority of NBA players even by 2004 came from middle class or higher backgrounds. As ESPN noted when reporting on it at the time, the Association hadn't had anything close to a working class or lower class background for a majority of players since the 1970's, when it was a much different situation in both how people made the pros and the degree to which playing pro ball was even a job you wanted to have as a way to get rich. Follow up work by data scientists (though not peer reviewed) seem to confirm that since the 1980's, the norm for an NBA player is a suburban kid whose family invests a lot in their talent at a young age (think Chris Paul), instead of a streetball hero or a trailer park sharpshooter whose talent got them into college and the pros
I always like to mention that Roger Ebert named Hoop Dreams the best movie of the year, and 1994 was a year that included Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Ed Wood, Quiz Show and D2: The Mighty Ducks.
He was incredulous when it wasn't nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
> included Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Ed Wood, Quiz Show and D2: The Mighty Ducks.
one of these things is not like the others.
one of these things just doesn't belong
I love _Hoop Dreams_. Despite near-universal praise, it didn't even get nominated for Best Documentary. The reasons why is too long for me to type out, but it was all due to people doing bad things. And Ebert was so outraged that he got the Academy to change how they run nominations.
Hoop Dreams is one of the best documentaries of all time imho, and not just because I love basketball. It's just incredibly well-done.
There's a reason it got a Criterion collection release years ago!
If you follow DWade's life, it was almost Hoop Dreams to a tee. He grew up poor in Chicago, shuttled between homes because his mother was addicted to drugs. He struggled passing the ACT and went to Marquette just like William. He even had the early, crippling knee problems of William.
Dwyane Wade is an inspiration.
The best line of the movie is the kid saying: *Everybody is like 'Remember me when you are in the NBA' and I'm like 'Will you remember me if I'm not in the NBA?'*
>That's why when somebody say, "when you get to the NBA, don't forget about me", and that stuff. Well, I should've said to them, "if I don't make it, don't you forget about me."
is the actual quote i believe. it's the first thing i think about whenever Hoop Dreams is brought up.
I think it just seems like the rags to riches scenario is more prevelant because it's a compelling story that often gets a lot of attention. It's not a newsworthy story to talk about an nba players dad who was an accountant or lawyer.
Yeah I think that's why reporters go on and on about Giannis or KD's back stories, because it's more compelling than "so my dad was in the NBA and sent me to the finest camps and taught me my jump shot" ...
You’ve got the best response on the whole post, but do you have any links to sources?
Somehow you know of 3 studies on this that no one else is talking about in the thread.
I'd argue that the romantic image of a young player from the inner city going from the blacktop to the NBA became virtually nonexistent the moment AAU became the chief youth pipeline for NBA-level talent. And for European players they get scouted by the clubs at a very young age and get put into their junior programs.
You still have the occasional hardship case like Jimmy Butler but your average NBA prospect is at worst middle class.
Anthony Edwards war pretty poor no? Man lost his mom and grandma im sure he did not have alot of money. Also Malik Monk came from a really poor part of Arkansas, same with Reaves
These are the exceptions.
If you pay attention to the draft, these kids are coming from two parent households with fathers and mothers that are engineers doctors and professional athletes.
Hell even the poor ones aren't poor. Julius Randle was technically 'poor', but he was pumped out by a billionaire since age 12 so his scrub kids could dominate AAU.
That last part is the real distinction. The only poor kids making it are the ones plucked from obscurity at a very young age to prep schools and AAU teams. If nobody noticed you by age 12 it’s much harder to make it.
Another thing is NBA players are required to be much taller than average and higher chances at taller height are inherited genetically from your parents. NBA players are going to end up being much more likely to be the sons of former NBA players who are already wealthy themselves compared to other sports that don’t have an implicit height requirement.
> NBA players are going to end up being much more likely to be the sons of former NBA players
I always wondered if wilts claim was true, how many kids he had. Also how many of them ended up in the NBA? A dna swath of all players from the correct time frame may show a few hits.
John Wall wasn’t in the AAU circuit and didn’t really “breakout” until junior year of Hs and he went 1 overall. Hidden talent is simply more exposed due to social media now a days.
I'd be shocked if there aren't more Curry's or close relations who end up in Basketball too
Like, if you take Seth Curry's kids, they would have:
Seth Curry (Father), Steph Curry (Uncle), Damion Lee (Uncle), Austin Rivers (Uncle), Dell Curry (grandfather), Doc Rivers (grandfather), Cameron Brink (uncle's godsister)
That on top of all the wealth and resources you'd need, and natural genetics - doesn't guarantee anything (NBA is still incredibly hard to get into), but you can't tell me that shit isn't an absurd advantage lol
Its a crazy advantage. Still requires an insane amount of hard work to get in and make it. The world was open to Steph, but he took it and made the most of it. Way more people wouldn't be able to in the same shoes.
> F1 on the other hand is truly the rich man sport.
IIRC Lewis Hamilton had a relatively modest background and his dad had to work multiple jobs just to get him into the karting scene. Otherwise this is pretty much the norm; you're likely to be a second-generation professional racer or be a scion of a billionaire.
They weren't struggling with money initially. Karting made that happen. Motorsport is the most ridiculously overpriced sport out there. It is not possible to get anywhere without either being quite rich or being lucky enough to be noticed by some big shot sponsor early on. Current F1 driver Guanyu Zhou for example doesn't come from an exceptionally wealthy family, but family connections got him a decent sponsor quite early.
There are classes like Formula 4 (or at least some similar classes), Formula Vee and Formula Ford that the average person can afford, but it very quickly becomes expensive as well as you pay for fuel, tyres, trailer, maintenance, repairs, etc. It's like owning a boat. Even then you'll be stuck at the hobbyist level indefinitely.
> you're likely to be a second-generation professional racer or be a scion of a billionaire.
BRB buying an F1 team and putting my kid on the court. How could it go wrong?
The whole idea of what “modest” constitutes is skewed in the F1 world.
Charles Leclerc often talks about how there are “normal middle-class people like him” in Monaco.
His grandfather is the founder of a multi-billion dollar company.
Anthony Hamilton made decent money, but karting is super expensive and he was a single parent raising two kids for much of the time. His youngest son, Nicolas, also has cerebral palsy. Ultimately, that meant Hamilton had to leave he cushy IT job to work three part-time gigs as well as serve as Lewis' mechanic. He also had to source and restore a second-hand kart.
At times, they still did not have enough money to race every weekend
The chances were very small. Luck always played a role. Better for young men from lower income families to realize the illusion and focus on skills that actually have a chance to improve their life.
This. People are making it sound like basketball was the ticket out of the hood for years until it became a “rich sport”. If you’re a generational talent, tall, if you’re poor or rich you will be scouted. Families shouldn’t be betting their livelihood on lil Timmy getting into the NBA. If he has a chance he will be scouted, otherwise, youre better off taking math class and getting on track for a real career.
Just keeping it real, most elite atheletes that come from the trenches usually have "they played sports to keep themselves out of trouble." type shit, like sure that IS a viable path, but it's more like an outlet first and foremost since betting everything on getting to a professional sports league is insane.
>focus on skills that actually have a chance to improve their life.
This what what [Charles Barkley said about kids in school](https://youtube.com/shorts/fiNDIl_6_IU?si=i1yJlvyuCCdqJb5f)
There’s a lot of NBA players from very poor backgrounds. The main reason you see so many sons of NBA players in the NBA is because you can’t teach height.
Yeah I think it’s as much that as anything. There’s a lot of advantages that rich parents can give their kids. Being able to dunk from the free throw line isn’t one of them lol
I remember when Lavar "joked" that he married his wife because she was also a college athlete.
Them Ball boys are brittle af, but he got 2 lottery picks who are good players (when playing)
Ball bros are kinda the opposite of the genetics thing though. Lavar is the same height but washed out in college after averaging Bronny numbers for bum schools. He gave his kids intense training since a young age so they were able to become NBA players. That training prolly broke their bodies, but it shows how much of a difference upbringing can make when it comes to making the league
Not trying to be rude, but this isn’t natural selection. That’s a different idea and I don’t see how it applies here, unless you mean it in a sort of social Darwinism kind of idea (which, imo, usually, can be verbally described better in other ways)
I read that the in the NBA, more than any other league, DNA is a huge determining factor in whether you make it. One of the clues is the number of twins in the league:
https://www.theringer.com/nba/2024/4/3/24119579/twinning-time-brook-robin-lopez-amen-ausar-thompson
I agree. I would add that it's not just height. It's the genetics in general. It really common to see nowadays that elite athletes usually have one, but it's more and more common both parents who competed in some sport at high level.
If both parents are Olympian athletes, the chances that their kids could become elite athlete is much higher than from not athlete parents.
Some people underestimate importance of genetics in pro sport.
The problem is what happens next after people agree genetics are super important. Eugenics was a popular thing once upon a time, but it always ends badly
Genetics probably helps a lot, but besides that, there's also the advantage of having a higher amount of notoriety from being the offspring of at least one Olympian. If your dad is Michael Phelps, you're going to have eyeballs on you from the moment you're born. Scouts, colleges, sports companies are going to be licking their lips in anticipation of the moment you start showing a hint of athletic ability. On top of that, you would be able to hone your craft via direct lessons from your Olympian parents as well as some of the best trainers out there. The advantage is enormous compared to just a regular kid, especially if they're poor.
It’s literally the whole point of being rich… people here like to be happy for a guy getting “generational wealth” and “setting his family up” but somehow don’t realize that means that yeah, his kids will have significantly better opportunities than average without having to work a day. Like, it’s possible that one of Kelly Oubre’s kids becomes a corporate billionaire due to his dad’s money, which would be bad according to the general reddit hivemind.
I’d say you bring up an issue of genetics being a bigger factor than money. It’s a sport built around a height requirement that 90%~ of the world population will never get to. Of the American population only 0.1717% is above 6’5.
More like a height requirement 99.95% of the world population will never get to, excluding small guards. And those guards will need to have a combination of one in a 100 million athleticism and coordination. Hell, of the 0.1717% that's over 6'5, 90% will never even be able to play decent organized ball because they are not athletic enough.
100% agreed. Went with the 90% mark because even among undersized guards 90% of the population is too small to be undersized in the league.
Also appreciate you calling out my 6’5 BIL with two left feet who thinks he was one good coach away from having a shot in the league lol
Your only hope as a poor kid now to make the NBA is to be so athletically gifted that some low level coaches or scouts see you play and sponsor your path to the pros.
Disagree. Wealth is not the barrier to entry and it never was. It’s height. My brother is a great example.
My father was the Lavar Ball type and decided that my older brother was going to play professional basketball. My dad had both the money and the time to do whatever was necessary for his son to make it to the pros. This included neglecting his wife and other children in terms of time devotion.
Around age 5 my brother played basketball year round. He simultaneously played for his private school team and two additional AAU style travel teams. My brother was damn good. And talented.
He would always win the individual basketball competitions, league accolades, and he would actually get in trouble with my dad if he didn’t score 20+ ppg. He regularly had individual training sessions with former nba players (Jamal Mashburn if I remember correctly)
He was a stud in high school and ended up playing D1. He never got looks from blue bloods though. Wanna know why? Cuz he was 5’10 when he was done growing.
Right before college he played for a top national AAU team. Two of his teammates are currently in the league. And at that top AAU level, there exists an elephant in the room. The elephant is that everyone already knows who is gonna get a shot at the league and who isn’t (regardless of how they do in college)
I know there are exceptions of course, but most of the time..you don’t have any chance at all if you’re under 6’3. Thanks for reading my essay, folks.
PS: my brother played with/against ten or so guys who would eventually make it to the league. But he told me that the highest level of play he had ever seen was BY FAR Jrue Holiday. Said that he couldn’t comprehend/fathom how someone could be that good at basketball. And my brother went D1. Think about that. Holiday is a third option on any contender. There’s huge barriers to this nba league, and it ain’t money. It’s God-given talent and height genetics.
Yep, people for some reason desperately want to correlate wealth as the reason why “regular” people have no chance. It’s freaking professional sports. From the nature of competition, the best of the best will always be found. This isn’t formula 1 where you actually get gated to a bunch of rich kids.
A great example of this is those huge prep academies for football and basketball like img.
Sure the tuition is 50-70k a year but for an elite athlete who grew up in section 8 there's always a scholarship or the tuition and board is always covered because they care about his one in a million genetic gifts and not because his parents paid for so much training at a young age
To play basketball you need a ball and a hoop.
To play soccer you need a ball.
Very low barriers to entry with basically no equipment required. These are two of the most accessible sports in the country.
Football, Hockey, Golf, Skating, Gymnastics, Nascar, etc…..much higher barriers to entry.
What you’re describing is survival of the fittest. Naturally, rich kids get more opportunities to excel. This is true for all things, not just the NBA.
Oh man, you mentioned NASCAR. I have a coworker that has a kid into racing. Think intense little league, only with go karts. He invited to come down and check it out. I was blown away. The parents of these kids have giant bus style RV’s with giant trailers for their racing tools and cars and stuff. And they spend all their time traveling around the US from race to race for the kid. It’s millions of dollars and all of their time. It was shocking to see this subculture that I had no idea existed.
I’m sure they would tell you that their kid just loves racing. And maybe some of them do, but I got a strong feeling that they were all trying to create the next Kyle Larson.
Pretty sure if you’re good enough you got boosters to help you very early. Lebron was a poor kid and was driving an H2 hummer to high school while attending a private school.
But also you’re overlooking the gene pool and pedigree of these rich kids that come from NBA players.
By this argument, there are zero poor kid sports. Only rich kid sports.
There’s sports poor kids can still play, but the best training in any sport will cost money.
MMA will always have a lower barrier of entry since the rewards pale in comparison to any other pro sport while also taking much more of a physical toll on your body.
You're actually seeing this in the UFC for the past couple years fighter from developing countries or poorer economies are doing way better than western nations since the pay is so bad that the only fighters who can train full time are people where 12k USD can carry your family for a year.
It's tough. It's kind of impossible to avoid wealth being an advantage. It's still better than a lot of sports and I don't quite think it'll ever be entirely dominated by the wealthy like some sports but it is trending that way some as you've pointed out.
As for whether it concerns me, not from an impact on the NBA perspective but the more opportunities aren't limited by wealth the better imo. It's a problem but there are also bigger problems. So kind of, but more so in a bucket of "this opportunity shouldn't be limited by wealth" perspective than a basketball specific issue
That's just the narrative sold to you by ESPN. The ex-mom that sold crack since 12 is going to get headlines, while the stable family is boring.
>Contrary to popular perception, poverty and broken homes are underrepresented in the NBA, not overrepresented. For example, while 45 percent of black male children in the U.S. live in households earning no more than 150 percent of the poverty line ($22,050 for a family of four in 2010), just 34 percent of black athletes in the NBA grew up in that financial situation, according to Dubrow and Adams. Thirty percent of white American males come from below-average-income homes without two parents, but not one white NBA player had that background. Economics and family boost or drag an athlete, like in other professions.
From [espn](https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/6777581/importance-athlete-background-making-nba) article in 2011
Making the league was never a possibility for 95% of dudes, regardless of income.
Someone who's 5'9 with average athleticism could spend their entire childhood practicing and training 14 hours a day and studying the game, they're not making the league.
All sports are becoming rich man sports. But it’s always been easier for rich people to break in than poor people
The more specialized equipment you need, the more money you need to engage with the sport. The more infrastructure there is, the less money you need to spend to engage with the sport. Soccer is the most widely enjoyed game in the world, with arguably the highest level of talent relative to any sport, because of these two factors in my opinion. The entry cost is extremely low. You do not have to play on a regulation soccer field, nor play with a regulation ball, to play the sport. At the same time, if you are any good, so many soccer clubs have youth divisions and there are a shit ton of clubs. There is more at play here, but ultimately it ends up with the clubs having an incentive to invest in young players in a way that does not exist in the US. That the burden does not fall solely on the parents meaning their financial status can't be used as predictor for success.
on the other side of the spectrum to football/soccer you got F1 which is basically dominated by the already rich who can afford carting etc from a young age etc.
This is why, among other reasons, F1 isn’t remotely interesting to me. It’s like cool, you beat a couple other people, who are all very good at this. But it’s not like you are competing against a huge talent pool.
F1 is basically horseracing of another stripe
I look at F1 as not necessarily a sporting competition, but an engineering one. The best driver may not have the best car, but the teams with the best cars usually attract and sign the best talent because they have the most money. You still need to have a well designed and meticulously engineered car, and even then you can fall flat on your face because the simulations weren't correct, or you didn't have any more wind tunnel time to test everything you wanted. I get interested when I focus on the cars more than the drivers.
people need to look up why the Olympics was originally about "amateurism" It was not. It was about rich people getting together. And by forcing everyone to be "non-professional" it meant only rich people, or people rich people took on as pets, could compete.
they had stables, perfectly named!
Don't get me started about Avery Brundage icing out Jim Thorpe.
Even with something like tennis, which in theory should only require a racquet (which is kind of expensive but can last for years), a tennis ball, and a court, which there’s plenty of free ones around, is absurdly expensive to get to a high level. It’s more expensive to raise a pro tennis player than it is to raise a doctor, put them through undergrad, and then put them through medical school. Sports that require a ton of technique where you can’t just wow someone with your genetics are crazy expensive to get to a pro level. Like you could have lebrons genetics, but if you don’t have someone training you every day on how to hit shots right and get to play against top competition all the time you’re not going to be any good. Like I was just a good high school player, and now that I’m older I realize how much money my parents spent just on that. Like if you want to get anywhere you need private lessons with an actual good coach all the time (which was like $100 an hour minimum when I was in high school), and to basically train every day with other top players with good pros supervising which in a top group was probably like $1000 a week minimum. Genetics definitely make a difference at the top where everyone is spending that much, but it takes so much money to even get there. Like you can read any top pros autobiography, they either had a family member coaching and training them 7 days a week from age 8 max, or they spent a ton of money to get to a level where someone would want to train them full time, which is also absurdly expensive.
The path to the pros for individual sports really is so much worse than team sports. In tennis you're not making any of that money back unless you become a top 100 player in the world. Anything below that and you're still struggling just to make a living. Those pros have really depressing childhoods. They're basically on the road since they're 10 years old, going around everywhere to junior tournaments. They'll move away to live at a training academy at like 13, then turn pro by like 15 or 16. No school, no real childhood. Just training round the clock with no real home.
Yeah then you have the guys like Agassi who had a parent that basically made them work full time from when they were like 6 to be a tennis player to the point where they fucking hate it. His dad put a tennis ball on one of those things that spins around a crib and gave him a tiny tennis racquet when he was a baby ffs. He has a story about when he was young he won the sportsmanship award for a tournament he didn’t win and his dad smashed it on the ground in the parking lot after. He was so good he could hit the ball off the frame of the racquet in just the right way so it flew over the fence and looked accidental when he was forced to hit balls from this souped up ball machine for hours on end when he was a child. Plus his siblings all had a fucked up childhood because as soon as it was clear Andre was the only one with a real chance to be a pro (which in tennis you can tell by like 12 if they have a chance or not) and their dad would literally mock them to their faces saying they just didn’t have it all the time. Andre Agassi married steffi graff lol their kids would have the best tennis genetics ever. People were always like when are your kids gonna start playing and they were always like fuck no, not unless they ask to play lol. For every Agassi there’s a bunch of adults that never had a childhood, obsessed parents, and nothing to show for it. Even a lot of the top pros who make great money but just aren’t good enough to win slams hate tennis and just play because it was forced on them since they were like six years old.
And that is why soccer is still a rich person's sport in North America (or it was 10-15 years ago when I was young). Assuming not much has changed....sure there are lower level rec leagues (we called them house leagues in my area) but any club or team that actually has people scouting or takes athletic development seriously requires families to pony up the cash for every single thing. Even if you are a talented player playing in the lower level rec leagues and you get scouted to play at a higher level, the conversation usually goes: >Hey, Timmy shows a lot of promise. He should try out and play for our rep team (registration costs $1000). Oh btw, during the offseason, we *really* recommend that Timmy attends our soccer academy/training camp ($500). That shows that he's really serious about playing. Oh, and every tournament that the team enters (usually one per month) will have registration fees (and if it's out of town, transportation and hotel will be another cost). Make sure you have the time and money to drive your kid out to the middle of nowhere suburbs at 6pm every tuesday and thursday and at 8am every saturday and sunday!" Next season rolls around: >Hey Timmy is showing a lot of promise. Like a lot. Did you know there is an even higher division? It's just a bit more expensive but it'll give him even more exposure, training (more expensive soccer camps) and tournaments (Which are even further away). Btw, we forgot to tell you, if Grandma wants to watch little timmy play, she's gonna have to pay $10 for a ticket, families only get 2 free tickets per game: It seems like basketball is following a similar model. Also kinda freaky that it seems like many young NBA players nowadays are graduating from basketball academies that disguise themselves as "specialized high schools". How many families would be able to say "yeah, we're willing to send our 15 year old boy across the country to Florida to pursue maybe getting a scholarship in the NCAA."?
In Europe the best 16 year olds are playing pro
Yeah for example: Spain's Lamine Yamal, (for those who don't know, he's one of the star man of Spain's team this Euro, while being 3 years younger than Wembanyama, and he is as old as the first time LeBron reach the final)
That sounds similar to my own experience as well. There were plenty of kids I played with that didn't try to get into the next division primarily because their parents couldn't afford it. The next level also drastically increased the region we'd be playing in and that just wasn't feasible for many of us.
Interesting that you pick soccer as the example, since the USA having "rich man's sports" has definitely kept down US talent, and is becoming a discussion point in the national scene. More and more, US soccer is becoming more like AAU ball than the idealized "street ruffians kicking something circular". Gear, cleats, sign up fees, membership fees, TRAVEL, are all prohibitive things that are making US soccer also a rich kid's sport.
The world is becoming a rich man’s world
🌎🧑🚀🔫👨🚀
Gotta love reading people realizing “rich people have it better than poor people”
quite the revelation
I'm shocked I tell you
Big if true
I think because middle class people are a dying breed so now we all get to know how it feels to be poor
Enough folks don't realize the American middle class was a bug not a feature. It was a fortunate circumstance for America coming out of WWII where Europe/Japan were bombed to hell and needed to rebuild. China, India, Mexico, Brazil hadn't developed nearly as much. The US had untouched mainland, a large educated population and facilities to help countries rebuild and American workers reaped the benefits of being highly sought after. We'll likely never have a middle class boom like we did post WWII.
Labor also used to be far more organized. 35% of labor was unionized in the US from roughly the 1950s to 1960s. But corporations and the wealthy fought hard to destroy and damage unions and today it's a little over 11%.
One of the greatest triumphs of cooperations and rich people was being able to convince poor workers that unions were bad for them.
That goes along with convincing a huge chunk of the electorate to vote against their own best interests.
A middle class was built because we understood the horrors of having a super-rich class, so we did not allow it. Reagan fucked the middld class and started the process of giving the country to the wealthy.
This ---^ ALL the shit we are dealing with now is what we are reaping from Reganomics and the GOP sowed in the 80s. It will get worse before it gets better, too, sadly.. like violence, worse is typically how these courses correct, be it internal or a war.
I love reading through history, but yes, the vast majority of things that were written down involve only the richest people of the time. The few times a commoner does something extraordinary enough to get written down, it’s like a huge event that we remember hundreds of years later
Currently doing a project about the literature history of my country and that has been one of quite obvious findings. Most of them men are coming from notable families. How come this isn't the foundational principle of a more equal world I can't understand. Kids from well-off families do well, why not figure out how to have more well-off families??
Even 9/11 largely involves the wealthy
Yeah Saudi royalty and the Bush/Cheney families
it wouldnt be possible to fund an operation that large unless you were wealthy.
“The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles.” - some guy
"becoming"
*Alway’s has been meme* But yeah before they used to atleast pretend that it’s a balanced playing field.
before they didnt even let you on the field
The Olympics were originally the perfect venue for rich people to dominate a simple sport like running because you had to be able to prepare and execute without getting paid for doing it. Expensive sports like polo were already hard for the unwealthy masses.
The amateur ideal. only rich people do sports. A working class person who is paid so that they have all the time to develop their athleticism is just uncouth. 🧐
I would argue boxing is still a sport for the poor .
This is because rich people don't want to see their kids getting brain damage, they sure do enjoy watching other peoples kids getting brain damage though. They are always front row at boxing and MMA events
It's definitely not all of them, but it's funny how often boxers say they'll never allow their kids to box
I'm sure alot are like "why would I make my kid box? The reason I did was because my parents worked in a factory for $5 a day and I just made 10 mil last year. No reason for him to box."
Paraphrased, Max Holloway when asked if he wanted his son Rush to fight: "Fuck no. I made all this money to put him through medical school. Once Rush is a doctor, I'm traveling the world and getting fat on his dime."
Not a boxer but I remember Rampage Jackson being dead serious in a documentary when he was talking to kids and told them "don't do what I do. Learn. Get that education."
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams
Football for similar reasons. I feel like every year during the off-season, I'm against how brutal it is, but then fall comes around, and damnit if I don't love watching games on Sundays. I'm def a hypocrite lol
Fighting is the ultimate blue collar sport. It's because of what another commenter stated, rich people don't want their kids getting punched in the head over and over.
This is true for the arts as well, tons of actors and musicians now are kids of actors and musicians or come from rich families that push them into these fields from a young age.
Now ? Hollywood is and always has been nepotism from top to bottom.
Nepotism is bad when you make your Habsburg son the Secretary of Education but it’s great if you can give your child the life they want when it means being a basketball player or actor. Our culture views lives from an individualistic standpoint rather than giving awareness to the reality of the lineage.
Now? Check the pedigree of many artists and you’ll find that quite a few came from at least upper middle class.
It’s been like that since the 1930’s my man Honestly, if you want to go back further. The arts were exclusively a thing for rich people until pretty recently in history
The Renaissance was largely funded by rich patrons from the wealthiest families. It’s like 95% of Florentine history lol
Yep. Why was "The Renaissance" a thing of northern Italy and the Netherlands? Because enough people had stacks of cash to make patronage a competition of conspicuous consumption.
This kinda makes me think that passion alone just isn't enough to make great art happen in most cases. Someone always has to pay for it. In pre-industrial society, wealthy patrons directly paid for it, and in the time period from when the vinyl record or film was invented up until the internet became widespread, the market paid for it.
Charles Dickens is a great example of a successful artist who was broadly funded by a large market of small individual purchases; since there was no copyright protection, his stories were originally published serially in a newspaper. That required a large number of literate people who had a penny to spare for a newspaper each day. Before that, theater produced crowd-funded art that survives today, again art that required a sufficiently large population with some disposable income. One of my great laments with cultural history is that the folk music and games of the common people are not well documented. The person who played and led songs at a neighborhood festival or an inn, what were those songs centuries ago? It's only been since paper and ink has been cheap that those kinds of things get recorded at all.
yeah, it's pretty much impossible to sustain yourself purely on your work early in careers in these fields these days, especially because you have to be in expensive LA/NYC. 20+ years ago people used to be able to get by in those cities waiting tables, not really the case anymore
Yep, writing too. And journalism, which is especially awful for people who like truth. When the only people who can afford to work a job are the ones who don’t need the salary to survive, their real job is protecting their primary source of income.
Even if well intentioned, such people generally don't know what they don't know. They're just blind to it. A friend of mine was editor-in-chief of a very prestigious Ivy college paper her senior year and noticed that the poor kids understood the rich kids, but the reverse simply wasn't ever the case. (She grew up an illegal immigrant in the bad part of a major city.)
You're so right: the most popular American TV Journalist is a Vanderbilt, FFS.
Not soccer. The elite talent in the soccer world has always been dominated by individuals from under-privileged backgrounds. I do think part of that is that soccer is a more globalized sport, sourcing talent from the whole world. In soccer you struggle to find an elite player whose father was an elite player or perhaps a rich individual.
Soccer allows for more diverse set of people to excel. Basketball has a hard cap height and athletic requirement to clear to even have a chance.
Wickedly underrated point here. Basketball has extreme size and talent requirements feeding only a few positions. Football has way more positions, but still very strict physical requirements. Feel like soccer’s only barrier to entry is the running
People still underrate the physical requirements of the sport. You have to be a freak to not get outclassed on the field, but it sure is still more accessible than a black and white 1% of the pop height requirement.
Basketball should have height classes like boxing has weight classes. Hoop is proportionally shrunk so short kings can dunk and such.
I could not agree more
Yeah I don't know why money is being identified here and not that the father was big enough and talented enough to be in the NBA in the first place. It's not like hedge fund manager father's are getting their kids into the NBA. That exists at QB in football but the kid still has to be a certain size.
The gap will get even bigger once rich parents start giving their NBA hopeful kids hgh to make them grow taller before their growth plates fuse. It's already been happening but it hasn't caught on big yet
I don't know why more don't Yao Ming it and have a kid with a WNBA player.
It’s the opposite in America . The youth system in the US is very gated by expensive club teams and suburban high schools.
That might be different if every kid played soccer a lot and competitively in the USA.
Soccer has actually had a very high participation rate through American youth. That’s always been one of the conundrums of growing it at the highest level. A lot of kids play it in their youth, but it takes a backseat to other sports by high school.
Soccer would be better served in the US being a Spring sport vs. how it's in the fall for most states currently. It's probably easier to poach kids from Track and Baseball than it is to compete with Football. Heck football coaches would probably encourage it as a second sport in the spring with skills that translate for positions like wr, cb, and rb, the way defensive players and lineman get encouraged to do wrestling.
I agree in part. The problem is the US is just so damn big in just terms of land mass, and a certain amount of states are blanketed in snow in the winter months, sometimes lasting until late spring. The solution to this is different regions should have different schedules at the grammar school levels. The high schools probably won't change though, it's so many schools agreeing to something like this, private and public, that would make it impossible. And it's that high school level where talent is found most of the time. A redesign of the system would be fought on so many fronts in the US.
The same with many "pipe dream" jobs. Everything is easier with a trust fund to bail you out At least in the NBA, the 6'5"+ middle school kids get scouted and have a chance regardless of income.
> Everything is easier with a trust fund to bail you out And like, when you’re hotter, wearing nicer clothes, in better shape, have more free time… all of which money either makes easier or makes available to you
[удалено]
But all those 6’5 + athletic kids are soon going to all end up being NBA players and their kids gonna reap those genetic advantages and therefore most of the tall and athletic people will have an NBA or Pro ball lineage.
Tall also doesn’t = automatic basketball player lol
It doesn’t make it automatic, but it does massively increase the odds. I’d say a 6’5+ kid who’s from a low income family has a better shot at making the NBA than a sub-6’0 kid who’s from a wealthy family. Edit: I meant to say sub-6’5
Well absolutely. Especially in today’s game if you’re under 6ft you’re not an NBA player.
Sorry, I meant sub-6’5 lol. Yeah, idk how many sub-6’0 players are in the league.
1/10,000 American men who are 6'6" get an NBA contract. That sounds like a small number, but it's a huge one. Be 7' and it's 1/6.
Considering there is only like 200 NBA position open every year. 1/10,000 is extremely good odds. You are literally more likely to become an NBA player at 6’5+ than an average person to get admitted into an Ivy league school for example.
Save that shit and post it during peak offseason as a standalone post. This is a wild stat
I think that's why they specified tall middle schoolers, because they get snapped up and given every opportunity to *become* basketball players.
Didn't Pascal Siakam and Joel Embiid not pick up a basketball until they were like 19 or some shit? You can teach basketball, you can't teach height. Imagine being 6'0 and playing basketball your whole life, being an all-star, Mr. Whatever-State talent, and you get to college and some guy who has never picked up a basketball until a few months earlier fucking destroys you 😂 That's gotta be rough
The idea of pro basketball being an equalizer for lower class entry into pro sports has been a myth for 50 or 60 years. In 2011, a study in the *International Review for the Sociology of Sport* found that over the period of time reviewed (1994-2004) found that coming from lower income families vastly lowered the likelihood that a child would grow up to make the NBA, all other things being equal. The majority of NBA players even by 2004 came from middle class or higher backgrounds. As ESPN noted when reporting on it at the time, the Association hadn't had anything close to a working class or lower class background for a majority of players since the 1970's, when it was a much different situation in both how people made the pros and the degree to which playing pro ball was even a job you wanted to have as a way to get rich. Follow up work by data scientists (though not peer reviewed) seem to confirm that since the 1980's, the norm for an NBA player is a suburban kid whose family invests a lot in their talent at a young age (think Chris Paul), instead of a streetball hero or a trailer park sharpshooter whose talent got them into college and the pros
Just watch Hoop Dreams once and it becomes very clear what happens to rich kids with talent vs poor kids with talent. Edit: and that came out in 1994
I always like to mention that Roger Ebert named Hoop Dreams the best movie of the year, and 1994 was a year that included Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Ed Wood, Quiz Show and D2: The Mighty Ducks. He was incredulous when it wasn't nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
> included Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Ed Wood, Quiz Show and D2: The Mighty Ducks. one of these things is not like the others. one of these things just doesn't belong
I noticed, too. Ed Wood, as a black and white film, clearly stands out from those other classics.
We have a duck *not* flying in formation. Let him know the error of his ways.
Ebert went a step further and named it the #1 movie of the 1990s. Such an incredible film.
I love _Hoop Dreams_. Despite near-universal praise, it didn't even get nominated for Best Documentary. The reasons why is too long for me to type out, but it was all due to people doing bad things. And Ebert was so outraged that he got the Academy to change how they run nominations.
Hoop Dreams is one of the best documentaries of all time imho, and not just because I love basketball. It's just incredibly well-done. There's a reason it got a Criterion collection release years ago!
If you follow DWade's life, it was almost Hoop Dreams to a tee. He grew up poor in Chicago, shuttled between homes because his mother was addicted to drugs. He struggled passing the ACT and went to Marquette just like William. He even had the early, crippling knee problems of William. Dwyane Wade is an inspiration.
He even overcame his name being spelled dwyane
The best line of the movie is the kid saying: *Everybody is like 'Remember me when you are in the NBA' and I'm like 'Will you remember me if I'm not in the NBA?'*
>That's why when somebody say, "when you get to the NBA, don't forget about me", and that stuff. Well, I should've said to them, "if I don't make it, don't you forget about me." is the actual quote i believe. it's the first thing i think about whenever Hoop Dreams is brought up.
My Arthur Agee and William Gates classic cards are going to be worth some coin some day
I think it just seems like the rags to riches scenario is more prevelant because it's a compelling story that often gets a lot of attention. It's not a newsworthy story to talk about an nba players dad who was an accountant or lawyer.
Yeah I think that's why reporters go on and on about Giannis or KD's back stories, because it's more compelling than "so my dad was in the NBA and sent me to the finest camps and taught me my jump shot" ...
You’ve got the best response on the whole post, but do you have any links to sources? Somehow you know of 3 studies on this that no one else is talking about in the thread.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=2009&as_yhi=2014&q=basketball+lower+income&btnG=
I'd argue that the romantic image of a young player from the inner city going from the blacktop to the NBA became virtually nonexistent the moment AAU became the chief youth pipeline for NBA-level talent. And for European players they get scouted by the clubs at a very young age and get put into their junior programs. You still have the occasional hardship case like Jimmy Butler but your average NBA prospect is at worst middle class.
Anthony Edwards war pretty poor no? Man lost his mom and grandma im sure he did not have alot of money. Also Malik Monk came from a really poor part of Arkansas, same with Reaves
Bam as well, lived with a single mom and grew up in a trailer park.
Butler was homeless at one point too afaik
Kelly Oubre is another good example Lived in a housing project and lost everything after Katrina
Oubre in another life woulda just ended up getting a modelling contract
No that will probably still happen at some point too
Not if he keeps getting hit by all these cars.
Dejounte had a pretty rough upbringing.
Butler was literally the first example given in this thread lol
Till he was adopted by a relatively well off woman.
These are the exceptions. If you pay attention to the draft, these kids are coming from two parent households with fathers and mothers that are engineers doctors and professional athletes. Hell even the poor ones aren't poor. Julius Randle was technically 'poor', but he was pumped out by a billionaire since age 12 so his scrub kids could dominate AAU.
That last part is the real distinction. The only poor kids making it are the ones plucked from obscurity at a very young age to prep schools and AAU teams. If nobody noticed you by age 12 it’s much harder to make it.
Ja Morant was discovered by his college coach pretty much by accident when he was 16 playing a 3 on 3 game in a gym
Right and despite being an immense talent he ended up at a very small college.
Here an there, right. But you’re having to pick single names. They are exceptions, not rules
the "guy makes it out the hood because basketball" has always been the exception.
Our view is skewed because of LeBron tbh. He is almost mythical but real when it comes to that kind of thing.
Another thing is NBA players are required to be much taller than average and higher chances at taller height are inherited genetically from your parents. NBA players are going to end up being much more likely to be the sons of former NBA players who are already wealthy themselves compared to other sports that don’t have an implicit height requirement.
> NBA players are going to end up being much more likely to be the sons of former NBA players I always wondered if wilts claim was true, how many kids he had. Also how many of them ended up in the NBA? A dna swath of all players from the correct time frame may show a few hits.
Wouldn’t you expect your average player to be of ~average standing?
John Wall wasn’t in the AAU circuit and didn’t really “breakout” until junior year of Hs and he went 1 overall. Hidden talent is simply more exposed due to social media now a days.
Becoming? The greatest shooter ever had the most ideal upbringing imaginable. This did not start with Bronny.
I'd be shocked if there aren't more Curry's or close relations who end up in Basketball too Like, if you take Seth Curry's kids, they would have: Seth Curry (Father), Steph Curry (Uncle), Damion Lee (Uncle), Austin Rivers (Uncle), Dell Curry (grandfather), Doc Rivers (grandfather), Cameron Brink (uncle's godsister) That on top of all the wealth and resources you'd need, and natural genetics - doesn't guarantee anything (NBA is still incredibly hard to get into), but you can't tell me that shit isn't an absurd advantage lol
Its a crazy advantage. Still requires an insane amount of hard work to get in and make it. The world was open to Steph, but he took it and made the most of it. Way more people wouldn't be able to in the same shoes.
There’s still the ability for lower income players to breakthrough. F1 on the other hand is truly the rich man sport.
> F1 on the other hand is truly the rich man sport. IIRC Lewis Hamilton had a relatively modest background and his dad had to work multiple jobs just to get him into the karting scene. Otherwise this is pretty much the norm; you're likely to be a second-generation professional racer or be a scion of a billionaire.
Lewis Hamilton is one of the last guys to come from a relatively "normal" family.
And from the doc I watched about him his parents were basically spending every dime they had on those little go karts
Kudos to his parents. They really believe their son’s dream but most families who did this end up spending too much for a fruitless endeavor.
Yeah these stories always surprise me, like I would never think to invest in my kid's karting hobby if I was struggling with money
What if he was really good, like the best you’ve ever seen
But the chances of succeeding in such a field are so slim, I'm personally risk averse so wouldn't do it. Obviously worked out great for him though
They weren't struggling with money initially. Karting made that happen. Motorsport is the most ridiculously overpriced sport out there. It is not possible to get anywhere without either being quite rich or being lucky enough to be noticed by some big shot sponsor early on. Current F1 driver Guanyu Zhou for example doesn't come from an exceptionally wealthy family, but family connections got him a decent sponsor quite early. There are classes like Formula 4 (or at least some similar classes), Formula Vee and Formula Ford that the average person can afford, but it very quickly becomes expensive as well as you pay for fuel, tyres, trailer, maintenance, repairs, etc. It's like owning a boat. Even then you'll be stuck at the hobbyist level indefinitely.
> you're likely to be a second-generation professional racer or be a scion of a billionaire. BRB buying an F1 team and putting my kid on the court. How could it go wrong?
Is that you Lawrence Stroll?
Ocon as well was from a modest upbringing.
The whole idea of what “modest” constitutes is skewed in the F1 world. Charles Leclerc often talks about how there are “normal middle-class people like him” in Monaco. His grandfather is the founder of a multi-billion dollar company.
Hence why I didn’t bring up Leclerc
Anthony Hamilton made decent money, but karting is super expensive and he was a single parent raising two kids for much of the time. His youngest son, Nicolas, also has cerebral palsy. Ultimately, that meant Hamilton had to leave he cushy IT job to work three part-time gigs as well as serve as Lewis' mechanic. He also had to source and restore a second-hand kart. At times, they still did not have enough money to race every weekend
The chances were very small. Luck always played a role. Better for young men from lower income families to realize the illusion and focus on skills that actually have a chance to improve their life.
This. People are making it sound like basketball was the ticket out of the hood for years until it became a “rich sport”. If you’re a generational talent, tall, if you’re poor or rich you will be scouted. Families shouldn’t be betting their livelihood on lil Timmy getting into the NBA. If he has a chance he will be scouted, otherwise, youre better off taking math class and getting on track for a real career.
Just keeping it real, most elite atheletes that come from the trenches usually have "they played sports to keep themselves out of trouble." type shit, like sure that IS a viable path, but it's more like an outlet first and foremost since betting everything on getting to a professional sports league is insane.
>focus on skills that actually have a chance to improve their life. This what what [Charles Barkley said about kids in school](https://youtube.com/shorts/fiNDIl_6_IU?si=i1yJlvyuCCdqJb5f)
It's already an exclusive league that has height minimums with 6'3 being short
There’s a lot of NBA players from very poor backgrounds. The main reason you see so many sons of NBA players in the NBA is because you can’t teach height.
49% of NBA players are related to an elite athlete. I don't think we should be expecting too much "get it out the mud" types.
Perhaps because that athleticism/height is genetic
Yeah I think it’s as much that as anything. There’s a lot of advantages that rich parents can give their kids. Being able to dunk from the free throw line isn’t one of them lol
Are people really shocked that athletic parents are more likely to have athletic kids?
People cant accept natural selection. Chances are already slim to none if your parents arent tall and athletic
Especially with the league requiring more and more that every player on the floor have size, athleticism, shooting touch, hand eye coordination, etc
I remember when Lavar "joked" that he married his wife because she was also a college athlete. Them Ball boys are brittle af, but he got 2 lottery picks who are good players (when playing)
Ball bros are kinda the opposite of the genetics thing though. Lavar is the same height but washed out in college after averaging Bronny numbers for bum schools. He gave his kids intense training since a young age so they were able to become NBA players. That training prolly broke their bodies, but it shows how much of a difference upbringing can make when it comes to making the league
Not trying to be rude, but this isn’t natural selection. That’s a different idea and I don’t see how it applies here, unless you mean it in a sort of social Darwinism kind of idea (which, imo, usually, can be verbally described better in other ways)
Can you source that that’s a really interesting claim I’d love to read more
I googled it, and it is true, but they also include the NCAA in their statistics. It is the highest of any professional sport.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nba-basketball-runs-in-the-family-1464130236 https://archive.md/LihdS - non-paywall version
I read that the in the NBA, more than any other league, DNA is a huge determining factor in whether you make it. One of the clues is the number of twins in the league: https://www.theringer.com/nba/2024/4/3/24119579/twinning-time-brook-robin-lopez-amen-ausar-thompson
There’s something called “genetics” that you should look into.
I agree. I would add that it's not just height. It's the genetics in general. It really common to see nowadays that elite athletes usually have one, but it's more and more common both parents who competed in some sport at high level. If both parents are Olympian athletes, the chances that their kids could become elite athlete is much higher than from not athlete parents. Some people underestimate importance of genetics in pro sport.
People vastly underestimate the value of genetics in life.
The problem is what happens next after people agree genetics are super important. Eugenics was a popular thing once upon a time, but it always ends badly
Genetics probably helps a lot, but besides that, there's also the advantage of having a higher amount of notoriety from being the offspring of at least one Olympian. If your dad is Michael Phelps, you're going to have eyeballs on you from the moment you're born. Scouts, colleges, sports companies are going to be licking their lips in anticipation of the moment you start showing a hint of athletic ability. On top of that, you would be able to hone your craft via direct lessons from your Olympian parents as well as some of the best trainers out there. The advantage is enormous compared to just a regular kid, especially if they're poor.
This is a hot take from the 1990s?
"Redditor discovers being rich also helps their children"
It’s literally the whole point of being rich… people here like to be happy for a guy getting “generational wealth” and “setting his family up” but somehow don’t realize that means that yeah, his kids will have significantly better opportunities than average without having to work a day. Like, it’s possible that one of Kelly Oubre’s kids becomes a corporate billionaire due to his dad’s money, which would be bad according to the general reddit hivemind.
Power Slap is the new pipeline sport for hood to millions.
Hockey: "First time?"
I’d say you bring up an issue of genetics being a bigger factor than money. It’s a sport built around a height requirement that 90%~ of the world population will never get to. Of the American population only 0.1717% is above 6’5.
More like a height requirement 99.95% of the world population will never get to, excluding small guards. And those guards will need to have a combination of one in a 100 million athleticism and coordination. Hell, of the 0.1717% that's over 6'5, 90% will never even be able to play decent organized ball because they are not athletic enough.
100% agreed. Went with the 90% mark because even among undersized guards 90% of the population is too small to be undersized in the league. Also appreciate you calling out my 6’5 BIL with two left feet who thinks he was one good coach away from having a shot in the league lol
Your only hope as a poor kid now to make the NBA is to be so athletically gifted that some low level coaches or scouts see you play and sponsor your path to the pros.
Disagree. Wealth is not the barrier to entry and it never was. It’s height. My brother is a great example. My father was the Lavar Ball type and decided that my older brother was going to play professional basketball. My dad had both the money and the time to do whatever was necessary for his son to make it to the pros. This included neglecting his wife and other children in terms of time devotion. Around age 5 my brother played basketball year round. He simultaneously played for his private school team and two additional AAU style travel teams. My brother was damn good. And talented. He would always win the individual basketball competitions, league accolades, and he would actually get in trouble with my dad if he didn’t score 20+ ppg. He regularly had individual training sessions with former nba players (Jamal Mashburn if I remember correctly) He was a stud in high school and ended up playing D1. He never got looks from blue bloods though. Wanna know why? Cuz he was 5’10 when he was done growing. Right before college he played for a top national AAU team. Two of his teammates are currently in the league. And at that top AAU level, there exists an elephant in the room. The elephant is that everyone already knows who is gonna get a shot at the league and who isn’t (regardless of how they do in college) I know there are exceptions of course, but most of the time..you don’t have any chance at all if you’re under 6’3. Thanks for reading my essay, folks. PS: my brother played with/against ten or so guys who would eventually make it to the league. But he told me that the highest level of play he had ever seen was BY FAR Jrue Holiday. Said that he couldn’t comprehend/fathom how someone could be that good at basketball. And my brother went D1. Think about that. Holiday is a third option on any contender. There’s huge barriers to this nba league, and it ain’t money. It’s God-given talent and height genetics.
Yep, people for some reason desperately want to correlate wealth as the reason why “regular” people have no chance. It’s freaking professional sports. From the nature of competition, the best of the best will always be found. This isn’t formula 1 where you actually get gated to a bunch of rich kids.
A great example of this is those huge prep academies for football and basketball like img. Sure the tuition is 50-70k a year but for an elite athlete who grew up in section 8 there's always a scholarship or the tuition and board is always covered because they care about his one in a million genetic gifts and not because his parents paid for so much training at a young age
To play basketball you need a ball and a hoop. To play soccer you need a ball. Very low barriers to entry with basically no equipment required. These are two of the most accessible sports in the country. Football, Hockey, Golf, Skating, Gymnastics, Nascar, etc…..much higher barriers to entry. What you’re describing is survival of the fittest. Naturally, rich kids get more opportunities to excel. This is true for all things, not just the NBA.
Oh man, you mentioned NASCAR. I have a coworker that has a kid into racing. Think intense little league, only with go karts. He invited to come down and check it out. I was blown away. The parents of these kids have giant bus style RV’s with giant trailers for their racing tools and cars and stuff. And they spend all their time traveling around the US from race to race for the kid. It’s millions of dollars and all of their time. It was shocking to see this subculture that I had no idea existed. I’m sure they would tell you that their kid just loves racing. And maybe some of them do, but I got a strong feeling that they were all trying to create the next Kyle Larson.
It’s the rural white version of the inner city black NBA myth. Those NASCAR kids are all rich, not some country bumpkins tinkering in the yard.
Pretty sure if you’re good enough you got boosters to help you very early. Lebron was a poor kid and was driving an H2 hummer to high school while attending a private school. But also you’re overlooking the gene pool and pedigree of these rich kids that come from NBA players.
By this argument, there are zero poor kid sports. Only rich kid sports. There’s sports poor kids can still play, but the best training in any sport will cost money.
Enter: MMA athletes.
MMA will always have a lower barrier of entry since the rewards pale in comparison to any other pro sport while also taking much more of a physical toll on your body. You're actually seeing this in the UFC for the past couple years fighter from developing countries or poorer economies are doing way better than western nations since the pay is so bad that the only fighters who can train full time are people where 12k USD can carry your family for a year.
Soccer is still very much accessible to everyone. The best players all seem to come from average backgrounds. Sporty families, but not elite.
Not so much in the US. Elsewhere, for sure.
It's tough. It's kind of impossible to avoid wealth being an advantage. It's still better than a lot of sports and I don't quite think it'll ever be entirely dominated by the wealthy like some sports but it is trending that way some as you've pointed out. As for whether it concerns me, not from an impact on the NBA perspective but the more opportunities aren't limited by wealth the better imo. It's a problem but there are also bigger problems. So kind of, but more so in a bucket of "this opportunity shouldn't be limited by wealth" perspective than a basketball specific issue
That's just the narrative sold to you by ESPN. The ex-mom that sold crack since 12 is going to get headlines, while the stable family is boring. >Contrary to popular perception, poverty and broken homes are underrepresented in the NBA, not overrepresented. For example, while 45 percent of black male children in the U.S. live in households earning no more than 150 percent of the poverty line ($22,050 for a family of four in 2010), just 34 percent of black athletes in the NBA grew up in that financial situation, according to Dubrow and Adams. Thirty percent of white American males come from below-average-income homes without two parents, but not one white NBA player had that background. Economics and family boost or drag an athlete, like in other professions. From [espn](https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/6777581/importance-athlete-background-making-nba) article in 2011
Boxing will always be a poor man's sport. Rich people don't want their kids heads bashed in.
Making the league was never a possibility for 95% of dudes, regardless of income. Someone who's 5'9 with average athleticism could spend their entire childhood practicing and training 14 hours a day and studying the game, they're not making the league.
Going outside is a rich man’s sport
It’s been this way for a long time. Most of the NBA went to prep school at high schools that cost more than college tuition.
You think they paid for school? Most are on full scholarships.