The United Stated does not have an event like the The European Championships, which requires a player to demonstrate skills in each of nine ball, ten ball, eight ball and straight pool to be successful. The European Championships also includes an international team match in which each country fields a team. I think that, over the years, the existence of the European Championships has helped make the Europeans better rounded players than the Americans. Similarly, the league system in America does not cover all these disciplines on a regular basis, which is different from the German leagues that have brought us three WPA World 9-ball champions in Ortmann, Souquet and Hohmann, each of whom has also won major international titles at straight pool.
Another factor is that Europeans often play cuesports that are more difficult than pool. Snooker, a game requiring better cueing skills than pool, has had a place in the emergence of many top European players, Mika Immonen among them. Those that started with snooker and developed some proficiency in it often have an advantage when it comes to pocketing the balls. In fact, even women's snooker has now produced three hall of famers in pool in Kelly Fisher, Allison Fisher and Karen Corr, In the UK, English 8-ball, which is played on the kind of pockets that are more associated with snooker, has also been a factor. Appleton, Shaw, Melling and Selby all began with English 8-ball and have been four of pool's straightest shooters. Russian Pyramid has also figured in producing some awfully straight shooters, as sharpshooters Gorst, Chinakhov and Stalev all began with that game.
These are some ways in which the European pool scene is, indeed, more conducive to the development of champions than the American system.
I didn`t find time to reply yesterday, but here are my thoughts:
The European Championships have developed into a very important tournament because they bring fame to the winners and fame equals governmental funding and sponsorship contracts. I agree that this develops better rounded players, since every discipline is a chance to raise into the elite group of players who don`t have to worry about money and can focus on just playing pool.
The German league is the strongest league in the world today, but this is a quite recent development. Ortmann, Souquet, Eckert, Engert and maybe even Hohmann are not products of a league system, but come from the same pool playing background as their American counterparts. Bars, smoke, a certain Tom Cruise movie and yes, even gambling.
But even then, the Germans were far ahead of their time in pool Europe with Tom Storm and maybe Austria´s Werner Duregger, who came close to something you can call a professional level. It wasn`t only marketing reasons to put a lot of snooker players into the early MC teams, it was the fact that nearly all of Europe was in the middle of stone age when it came to pool.
But at this time two very important things happened:
First of all some players realized the importance of a clean image if you want to be seen as an athlete and as you know Souquet and Eckert are still raw models for pool players today and someone like Jasmin Ouschan living this attitude to perfection.
Secondly other players realized if they want to learn and become better, they have to go to the place on earth were the best pool is played. So Mika, Thorsten, Allison Fisher, Gerda Hofstätter and even Nils Feijen in his early years came to the US.
...and time after time the Dutch developed their pool programm, Polish player became better and better, German League, the Austrians could build on Jasmin`s popularity and so on and so on.
I also have a little bit different opinion on the impact of Snooker, English 8ball and Pyramid on the European Pool scene. I think it is more of an indirect influence or better said it HAD an indirect influence.
It is very true that these games develop straight shooters, which lead to very successful players on the European pool scene. But the main consequences were, that the "real" pool players had to think about how they still can compete with those new opponents. So they for themselves became straighter shooters, worked harder on their basics and tried to master the pool specific skills like the break, jumps, banks and kicks the former snooker and pyramid players were missing. Which lead to players like Mark Gray, Tony Drago, Daryl Peach, Imran Majid, Boyes or Stalev slowly disappearing from the leaderboards.