could be Aids since playing soccer is gay as shit.
lol!
on a serious note my personal guess would be from complications arising from rec drugs that are brutal on the cardio system like cocaine, that probably seems prevalent due to the changes in the heart structure etc. that comes with highly conditioned athletes.
for instance... I recently read this article about world class swimmers when the whole phelps thing was big news. they did a study on some of these top competitors... and to their surprise, their hearts were EXTREMELY enlarged, taking on what was described as an almost torpedo like structure. it basically allowed their hearts to pump massive amounts of blood in a forceful piston like action.
the most interesting aspect of this enlargement though, was that it subsided not all that long after they ceased their grueling training. their hearts actually atrophied back to a more normal state when they were not extremely conditioned, but the enlargement did not seem to show any complications healthwise. now, if you were to factor in other aspects on top of that, such as coke or amphetamine abuse, heavy drinking... the occasional world class athlete dropping dead now and then doesn't seem all that unbelievable... it happens even in cases where there was no apparent obvious history of any sort of drug use. also, any sort of viral infection that effects the cardiovascular system I imagine is all the more lethal in a highly optimized and oversized heart that is conditioned for a particular activity... like the obvious conditioning involved in the amount of running soccer players do.
while I agree and find soccer one of the most boring things ever, you can't deny the excellent conditioning that some of those guys have, same as most major popular sports. I just have a general feeling that the use of certain drugs that obviously tax the heart is a strong possibility for increased morbidity in people that you would not otherwise expect to just drop dead from a heart related complication.
