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What if I told you practically almost every skill/artform is like this? At the high levels, it's not only mechanics but also a mind game especially if it's adversarial like a team-based sport. There are very very few things in the world where you are not better off with more juice flowing through your brain. And almost everyone is so mechanically gifted at the tail ends that winning/losing almost entirely boils down to strategy.
This is why I find people who harp about their hobby having so much richness and depth and complexity to be done right, so annoying. It's like stfu man, everything other than stamping envelopes is like this. I'm all ears to discuss the particular ways in which your hobby is uniquely complex in ways that is not obvious, but the fact it is complex and multidimensional in and of itself is not very interesting.
I naively assumed that the skill ceiling was lower in the mental game of soccer and the pros were distinguished by varying degrees of athleticism. But actually no, even among the best players there's a huge variation in levels of spatial awareness.
Game sense, it's usually called, and yes, once a base threshold of athleticism is achieved it's the biggest factor for success in most sports. With some exceptions, as american football and baseball do have players whose job is mostly maxing unidimensional athleticism, but not all of them. Game sense is still the top skill of an american football quarterback.
To an untrained eye, watching sports you see a very chaotic situation and don't understand why some players are so revered, they just seem to be lucky to find themselves in a position to score a goal and other players in that position would have had similar success rates. But then over time, you figure out how most of sports is about putting yourself in that favorable position.
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What do you have against my hobby? Getting the stamp to match the paper grain is not something you learn on your first night of stampin.
I'm kidding, but yeah there is a huge amount of depth to a lot of things. I play in a rec league sport and my current skill level is frustrating because my strategic mind is easily outpacing my ability to execute. Not because I have a brilliant strategic mind, but because I'm badly out of shape so execution is harder.
I don't know if it was Kasparov, or if it's even true. When he was asked, "When should I learn openings?" his response was "After you've already become a grand master".
But I agree with the spirit of the probably fake anecdote above. Even if not in such an extreme form.
I think most hobbies are experienced best when there is an early "grind" period where you just put in work to build a solid fundamental/mechanical baseline far above the minimum required to start strategizing. This way when you start getting perceived as good (combination of mechanics and strategy), you can really take off.
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The particular ways that they're pointing out for soccer to be complex were in fact non-obvious to me, and I thought the writeup was interesting.
My second paragraph isn't directed at OP
fair point.
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