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You can make a pretty good argument that the United States is especially bad at identifying sports talent. It's an argument I'd agree with, too. The sports we're best at are the sports we invented. The United States doesn't need to be good at developing basketball or football players because they're the two most popular sports in the richest country in the world.But even when they're competing against each other, the American basketball and football teams are terrible at identifying talent. In the NFL, plenty of research has found essentially no long-term difference in the skill of decision-makers at identifying the best players in the draft.
It's why the optimal move in the draft is to trade down and give yourself more bites at the apple. And in the NBA, where individual performance is much less context-dependent, new research suggests that 6% of all draft picks become top-level contributors for the team that drafted them.