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RE: The STEEM FIFA Fantasy League - Round 1 Day 1 & 2
It was interesting to listen to Mikael Forssell's and Jari Litmanen's commentary of the game. Litmanen is probably the best athlete Finland has ever had. I think he was ranked among the 50 best footballers of the world in several seasons. The number of football players is half a billion which makes football about 500 times bigger a sport than ice hockey or 50,000 times bigger than ski jumping. When the junior player population includes every third world slum in the world you're talking about competition orders of magnitude stiffer than in any winter sport.
I tend to 'tune out' Finnish :D It is a terrible habit I have learned and wish I didn't do it.
The competition is pretty high for football and when it comes to ice hockey, the 'rich kids' who get a chance to play are losing their drive as it is easier to not train. Everyone wants to be a star, very few want to do the work.
It's still takes a lot of work to become an ice hockey pro. It's just that the player population is about 1 to 1,5 million. It's a small sport compared to football, basketball or volleyball. But as more and more countries industrialize and develop a middle class the number of ice hockey players will increase. There was a story on Kymmenen Uutiset about Kenyan ice hockey players who trained in the only ice hall of the country in Nairobi. They had boys and girls. That there even exists such a thing as Sub-Saharan African (SA excluded) ice hockey players was a complete surprise to me.