This entire thread is painful to read. Anyone who thinks that they're a better athlete just because more people play it is ridiculous. If everyone in the world played snooker I wouldn't argue that snooker players are the peak of athleticism. It's genuinely bizarre.
Football is a game which requires mental intelligence, tactical knowledge, spatial awareness, communication, understanding of the wind, things like this. None of these things have anything to do with being an athlete, but they are all absolutely required. A less than par athlete can still excel at football if he makes up for it in other areas. Lionel Messi is not someone I would consider to be a better physical specimen or athlete than anyone else who pushes themselves to the limit physically, be it in gymnastics, rugby, tennis, triathlon, whatever. It's about being a footballer. You can get all kinds of physical types in football that do well. Ronaldo and Messi aren't exactly carbon copies of each other are they? Yes, athleticism is a key part to being the best footballer in the world, but it's not pure athleticism. Other sports out there are more strenuous on the body. I'd be very interested to see how many of the top footballers in the world would compete with the top triathlon, pentathlon and decathlon athletes. All of those sports are pure athleticism.
Posting this thread in a football forum was always going to give a huge bias towards football from the results. But yeah, for me, every athlete has their specialty. If Ronaldo wasn't good at kicking a ball he'd be a rubbish footballer, but still an incredible athlete, I'm sure, but I don't think he'd be the next Usain Bolt by default. In the end, athleticism is purely physical, ergo, the more physical a sport is - and I'm not talking about how they can twist their foot around a ball and direct it in a specific direction, I'm talking about peak physical contest - the better the athletes will tend to be. But in the end, it'll be apples and oranges no matter how you compare sports, because quite frankly they are all specialties. Football is about the specialty of ball movement with the foot combined with speed, stamina and limited strength checks. Rugby is about the specialty of ball movement with the hands combined with durability, speed, stamina and strength checks, with limited foot checks. Tennis is about the specialty of racquet use with primarily hand-eye co-ordination, speed, aerobics, strength and stamina checks. Boxing is about durability, strength, stamina and hand-eye co-ordination.
Honestly this is like saying that someone who speaks Mandarin is better at language than anyone because more people speak Mandarin than any other language.
You can pay a journalist, but you can't buy intelligence.