He's only like 5'7" now so it's not like they made him a giant. Giving growth hormones to kids with deficiency is, I think, standard medical practice now. I know a boy who got HGH and ended up like 5'6". It was done to prevent dwarfism and promote healthy development.
It wouldn't be an advantage to make him a giant - arguably it would be a negative due to his style. However, HGH allows substantially faster recover, and basically any athlete would take it if possible. Messi was able to do so legally unlike most footballers due to his condition.
When I was a kid, I always heard some Uncle claim that "rich people" bribe the doctors to give growth hormone to their children. That's why supposedly all the "rich people" children were tall (being well fed probably helps here)
Is that real that the rich, VC types give growth hormone to their children?
Good quality dairy is associated with high insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) levels in blood, which in turn leads to rapid cell growth. This explains why e.g. Dutch people went from being the shortest to the tallest in Europe.
I haven't heard of physical growth hormones per se, but it's definitely true of the psychological equivalent that is Adderall and related methamphetamine prescriptions for ADHD or "ADHD." It does wonders for getting kids to sit down and study, but at who-knows-what cost.
anecdotally, a lot of families around me seem to give these shots to kids in S. Korea and it doesn't seem like the vast majority of them "need" it. kind of crazy to me, but just an extension of how much looks are valued culturally here.
Messi's captured the hearts of the casual World Cup fan unlike anyone else. I don't know a whole lot about soccer -- more or less all I know is that the World Cup happens every few years, is played by national teams, and Messi makes impossible plays. What I do know is all because of Messi, whose wholesome relatability and exceptional ability brings casual viewers like me; I generally avoid sports because the players are hard to relate to or have personal flaws, but I love Messi's strong family roots. I would propose that merely for being a truly exceptional face of the sport he's the GOAT.
Maybe Maradona was that way in his day -- I'm barely aware that he was a good player of yesteryear -- but his drug problems (and the fact that his heyday was so long ago) make him much less relatable or exciting to investigate as a inspiration.
If you compare Messi's record with Maradona's, there's not much to compare. The latter could have been the best of all time, but he sabotaged his own career.
It’s incredibly annoying how whenever someone calls the game “soccer”, a smug European person pipes up to say that it’s really called “football”.
(And yes, I’ve only ever seen Europeans doing this, not people from any of the other parts of the world where it’s also called football).
Is it really so hard for you to accept that there are different words for things in different countries, and that not all cultures are identical to your own?
There's a subreddit called r/toprightmessi which is a collection of graphs showing how much Messi excels in so many respects. Crazy how in the biggest sport in the world there can be a player so far above and beyond the rest.
Alternatively, is it due to the ubiquity of soccer that particularly gifted individuals can be developed into their full potential? Someone that has a one-in-a-billion level of skill in something like frisbee-golf is less likely to be spotted and made into a professional player.
Sprinting is probably the purest example of no child not having a shot. Kids like to run. In fact, running is probably the most comprehensively sampled sport in the world. It's virtually impossible for anyone with a remotely normal childhood and a gift for sprinting to not know that they have it. Every kid knows who the fastest kid on their playground is. Every kid knows who the fastest kid in their class is, and in their school. And the fastest kids in each school/neighborhood/whatever compete at higher and higher levels until one day the fastest one is eating Chicken McNuggets[1] and signing 30 million dollar endorsement deals.
This is the weird thing for me about some of these discussions. I'm not going to question Messi's ability or ability in general but I've always wondered how much "extraindividual" factors start to play a role in those upper tails that are incentivized. We talk about Messi like he's just a marble sculpture handed down from God but that's not the case.
Looking at the figure, for example, one thing I noticed was the gap between the two upper points and the rest. It's hard for me to imagine there aren't some missing points there.
In other fields or areas, I think you have to start asking about things like fraud, other vice, or circumstances.
As you suggest, there's probably also some unique things about international football that make it difficult to generalize to other things. Everything is probably a little unique in certain ways really, but the incentives are so extreme and the play is very visible.
This is so true when looking at the distribution of top olympic athletes Vs distribution of countries that invest in developing said athletes in their chosen sport.
As a fan of disc golf I pained and laughed at “frisbee-golf”. The distribution of talent and accomplishment in professional disc golf .. a relatively young sport .. wouldn’t surprise anyone here.
Yes, but if you have many fat tailed distributions, increasing the sample size makes it increasingly less likely that it's _the same person at the end each time_
This sounds like nonsense. We're talking about multivariate distributions, and you haven't defined a norm by which ordinal comparisons can be made between sample points.
If you were to define some new sport from scratch tomorrow morning by the end of the afternoon the Bell curve would start to assert itself in those that chose to play in it and over time that would become more and more evident. Eventually a 'Messi' would turn up.
You say bell curve, which I understand as meaning normally distributed, but the point about Messi is that he is better than what one would expect to find from normally distributed ability.
I think it is interesting to ask why Messi is such an outlier. But maybe you think the fact that someone has to be best makes it all uninteresting.
Apparently, a good batting average for a modern-day batsman is 40+ with those above 50 being exceptional. Bradman's average was 99.94. The second highest average of all time is 60.97.
Most athletes who are at the top of their sport when they reach age ~40 tend to be crazy outliers. I’m thinking Michael Schumacher (F1), Tom Brady (NFL), Roger Federer (tennis), etc.
Specifically, in Javascript you can superficially push a navigated state into the location stack so that when the user presses the back button, it is now the inserted page instead of the “actual” one. Most FE devs consider this a dark pattern and refuse to implement it.
That said, it’s basically just the front end’s version of a redirect. Unfortunately it’s been used a lot especially by malware sites to basically jail people into their site.
No, it wouldn't be that. That can only prevent unload if it throws a native modal up (cousin of alert, confirm, prompt, etc).
I think what they must have done is push some URL to the history state, using the History API, to fuck with the back and forward buttons, enabling them to intercept when you navigate back, by having added an additional page in there, that you never visited, but that they can use to serve you this interstitial.
It would be immensely fun as a layperson to go up against Messi just to see how many seconds of trying to separate the ball from his possession I could go before I’ve tripped over my own feet and am laughing hysterically at the sheer magic of what he’s able to do.
I used to play semi pro volleyball in late puberty. We had a quite nice school team and we were second in regional championship which was taking place in the largest city of the country. One day while we were having a workout a friend of our coach showed up who was playing in the national team so we asked him to participate. Dude was willing to do so and from the way he played it was obvious he wasn’t really trying. So at one point he’s on the offensive and I jump to block him which I did. The one thing I remember even three decades later is just how much my palms hurt. Both my hands had gone numb. There was a lot of cheer and he came alongside to congratulate me, but all I was thinking at the moment was fuck this hurts so much. I can’t even imagine how it would feel had he gone full force while hitting the ball, although I seriously doubt I could have blocked it if he did.
A layman person can’t realize how vast the gap is between him/her and a pro player, let alone elite players. My guess is that you wouldn’t even have the time to react because he’s so agile he can change direction in a fraction of a second. You wouldn’t trip and fall, you’d simply stood still and by the time you’d register what happened he’d be ten feet behind you.
I'm big into tennis and have worked at a very prestigious (but non-major) tournament before. I've seen some of the top guys hit and it's mind-blowing how good they are.
I've also managed to hit with some former college guys who made top 500 ATP. they are insanely good with hard serves and insanely accurate ground strokes. the difference between those guys and a top level player is night and day...scary how good top athletes really are.
Also several years ago played in a pickup soccer game with a guy who washed out of Manchester United's academy as a 14 year old. In that same pickup game were guys who at the time were playing D1 soccer, and a few had spent time in MLS academies. The ex-United guy was lightyears ahead of everyone else despite having been out of the game for nearly 10 years and having a bad knee. The guys who make it to the top are utterly incomprehensible for a layman to understand.
It's just like how if you're playing a GM in chess, and you might be a decent enough player yourself, you won't even sniff a chance of doing well much less winning. Those same GMs turn around and get effortlessly destroyed by Carlsen or other top players. It's just a different level that us civilians cannot fathom.
I had a similar experience to yours. I used to do MMA and got fairly good. I’ve trained with people who fought locally in the ring and did ok with them in sparring matches. They were clearly better but I did ok against them. One day I ended up sparring with someone who eventually went on to become a semi finalist in the Ultimate Fighter. It was like I was 5 years old fighting a college student. I could do nothing against him. He completely destroyed me. He didn’t have a successful UFC career. I can’t imagine what it would be like to fight a top tier pro.
I read something a while back that was the same for hockey. When you see NHL players passing the puck around the average person has no idea the incredible wrist and arm strength required to make and take those passes.
I think it might have been a reddit thread where a commenter said that a guy came and played on their rec league that had played semi-pro hockey (maybe AHL) and even then nobody on the team could handle his passes. The commenter said it felt like his wrists were going to break.
Yeah, I was thinking about this a bit more and realized that unless he were specifically trying to make an exhibition of it, it would be really mundane. He’d approach, make one quick move and go right by. The sheer futility would still have me laughing though.
Shielding the ball is one the first things you learn to do in football. Even an average player should be able to keep a "layperson" away from the ball indefinitely, no magic required.
Magic only matters when you're trying to beat multiple players or someone who is roughly the same skill level as you, otherwise you can literally just run past them or beat them with a simple cut.
Oh yeah, that is like racing against top drivers! Similar to a sibling comment, I remember a story. It was me taking part in a karts race, just for fun of course, and in the group was this kid who was like 10 or 12?, and in less than 5 laps he built a gap so large, and 10 more laps later I ended up exhausted doing my theoretical best (trying to follow "best" racing lines and all) while he was just doing a warmup. After we finished, I talked to him and he told me that he was going to take part of the world Karting championship in two months later at the time, and I felt so trash compared to him. It was eye opening in a way that makes you wonder if their brain processes the world similarly to you, or if they are built too overpowered for us mere mortals.
Since every Messi thread somehow ends up with Ronaldo, there is a video where Ronaldo is "smurfing" disguised with a fake beard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68E53lcUIKE
The video is not really that interesting.
As for "entire team playing against a team of laypeople" - I would like to see something like this too. Best we can have is probably the match between American Samoa and Australia that ended 0-31
Readit News
Is that real that the rich, VC types give growth hormone to their children?
Maybe Maradona was that way in his day -- I'm barely aware that he was a good player of yesteryear -- but his drug problems (and the fact that his heyday was so long ago) make him much less relatable or exciting to investigate as a inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_FIFA_World_Youth_Champion...
(And yes, I’ve only ever seen Europeans doing this, not people from any of the other parts of the world where it’s also called football).
Is it really so hard for you to accept that there are different words for things in different countries, and that not all cultures are identical to your own?
Dead Comment
[1] https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2020/04/21/usain-bolt-beijing...
Looking at the figure, for example, one thing I noticed was the gap between the two upper points and the rest. It's hard for me to imagine there aren't some missing points there.
In other fields or areas, I think you have to start asking about things like fraud, other vice, or circumstances.
As you suggest, there's probably also some unique things about international football that make it difficult to generalize to other things. Everything is probably a little unique in certain ways really, but the incentives are so extreme and the play is very visible.
I think it is interesting to ask why Messi is such an outlier. But maybe you think the fact that someone has to be best makes it all uninteresting.
And his WC Final rival and PSG team mate.
Apparently, a good batting average for a modern-day batsman is 40+ with those above 50 being exceptional. Bradman's average was 99.94. The second highest average of all time is 60.97.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bradman
If you don't count his goals, he still has more points than the next guy. Points are goals plus assists.
Something like 15 of the best 20 seasons in history by points are him.
Player of the year every year for a decade.
The only thing that makes it look less spectacular is that ice hockey is not the world's favourite sport.
Messi is the goat of a game that is massively popular on every continent, that you can find people playing in a park in almost every city.
I will remember this game for a long time. The dramatic twists and turns are so memorable.
Dead Comment
How is 538 able to intercept my navigation away from their page?
That said, it’s basically just the front end’s version of a redirect. Unfortunately it’s been used a lot especially by malware sites to basically jail people into their site.
How common is it for FE devs to refuse to implement features that their employers tell them to implement?
I think what they must have done is push some URL to the history state, using the History API, to fuck with the back and forward buttons, enabling them to intercept when you navigate back, by having added an additional page in there, that you never visited, but that they can use to serve you this interstitial.
Just my 2c
That's a very "bold" choice of 538 if you ask me.
A layman person can’t realize how vast the gap is between him/her and a pro player, let alone elite players. My guess is that you wouldn’t even have the time to react because he’s so agile he can change direction in a fraction of a second. You wouldn’t trip and fall, you’d simply stood still and by the time you’d register what happened he’d be ten feet behind you.
I've also managed to hit with some former college guys who made top 500 ATP. they are insanely good with hard serves and insanely accurate ground strokes. the difference between those guys and a top level player is night and day...scary how good top athletes really are.
Also several years ago played in a pickup soccer game with a guy who washed out of Manchester United's academy as a 14 year old. In that same pickup game were guys who at the time were playing D1 soccer, and a few had spent time in MLS academies. The ex-United guy was lightyears ahead of everyone else despite having been out of the game for nearly 10 years and having a bad knee. The guys who make it to the top are utterly incomprehensible for a layman to understand.
It's just like how if you're playing a GM in chess, and you might be a decent enough player yourself, you won't even sniff a chance of doing well much less winning. Those same GMs turn around and get effortlessly destroyed by Carlsen or other top players. It's just a different level that us civilians cannot fathom.
I think it might have been a reddit thread where a commenter said that a guy came and played on their rec league that had played semi-pro hockey (maybe AHL) and even then nobody on the team could handle his passes. The commenter said it felt like his wrists were going to break.
Average Joe/Jane just doesn't get to touch the ball. Period.
Magic only matters when you're trying to beat multiple players or someone who is roughly the same skill level as you, otherwise you can literally just run past them or beat them with a simple cut.
As for "entire team playing against a team of laypeople" - I would like to see something like this too. Best we can have is probably the match between American Samoa and Australia that ended 0-31
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wg9ox9F7Vw
How it started for Brazil was certainly different from how it ended for Brazil in that World Cup.
Messi is the greatest and purest player of football.
I study Michaelangelo the same way I study Messi.
Art