I would guess that you can be top 1% of the general population in most things (and probably even like 5% of the field) just by trying really hard.
I mean, you're likely in top 6-7% of football players just by being on your high school's team. (1mil football players in HS, 15mil students; random Google numbers)
I would guess with effort, and I mean a lot of effort, pretty much anyone could make top 20% of a high school team. That puts you in 1% land.
The NFL has an average career length between 3 and 6 years, and has under 2000 players. So it's only 0.2% of high school players, or 0.01% of the population. (I just pretended average career length was 4 years, so it lines up with a translated HS cohort.)
This sort of makes sense: you can make 5% relatively easily, and 1% with serious effort. But top of the top professionals are 1 in 10,000, and to be that good you have to make it your life's work (plus it helps to be genetically predisposed).
Ed: Just wanted to add, to be top 1% of the NFL means, literally, you're one-in-a-million.
> I mean, you're likely in top 6-7% of football players just by being on your high school's team.
Not being from the US, I thought you were talking about soccer for a second, and your number did not make any sense at all. But that only confirms your point, in a way: if everyone does something, being part of the top would be much more difficult.
From the rough numbers I could find in a FIFA document, if you even play soccer by their definition, you're in only 4% of global population.
That includes schools, street football, and occasional players. If you drop the occasional part? About 2% of global population. That's still including schools and street games, corporate teams, etc.
So, just playing with any seriousness puts you in the top 2% of global population for soccer.
If you're a registered player, it cuts the number down to 1 in 4. So about 0.5% of global population. Im not sure registered players are, as a rule, better, but someone who is a serious player and registered stands a good chance of being top 1% globally -- something I think anyone with effort could do.
Being a professional soccer player puts you at about 1 in 100,000 globally, and 1 in 1,000 of people who play more than occasionally. (And 1 in 2,000 of people who play at all.)
I suspect that this is because I only looked at the NFL, which would be more like only top-tier teams, not all professionals.
The point being: the numbers actually are pretty darn close, and soccer seems to confirm my point about top 5% being relatively doable and top 1% being just effort.
I mean, you're likely in top 6-7% of football players just by being on your high school's team. (1mil football players in HS, 15mil students; random Google numbers)
I would guess with effort, and I mean a lot of effort, pretty much anyone could make top 20% of a high school team. That puts you in 1% land.
The NFL has an average career length between 3 and 6 years, and has under 2000 players. So it's only 0.2% of high school players, or 0.01% of the population. (I just pretended average career length was 4 years, so it lines up with a translated HS cohort.)
This sort of makes sense: you can make 5% relatively easily, and 1% with serious effort. But top of the top professionals are 1 in 10,000, and to be that good you have to make it your life's work (plus it helps to be genetically predisposed).
Ed: Just wanted to add, to be top 1% of the NFL means, literally, you're one-in-a-million.