American football requires a different skill tree than world football. So of course if you only judge by the standards of world football he is not great. But why would you do that?
And athleticism as different from health. In fact, beyond a threshold I believe it is detrimental to it.
That is likely to wind up true when it's all said & done but Tom Brady still holds that title.
Isn't it exactly the point of the article though that this doesn't necessarily mean elite across-the-board athleticism?
Your statement would also have described Tom Brady for most of his career, and I don't think anyone would seriously claim he was a 99%ile athlete (certainly not for sprinting, agility, etc.)
It sounds like for you, being a top athlete simply means being very good at a sport.
I've always generally understood athleticism to be about raw physical traits, like speed, strength and agility (and is therefore only part of the range of attributes that makes up the overall profile of a sportsperson).
Out of interest would you consider people performing at an elite level in high-skill, relatively low-physicality sports like golf to be top athletes?
We have our own kind of "American Football" in the Netherlands, it is called ice skating. But.. every Dutchman understands that being the world champion in ice skating doesn't say much as it is a highly local phenomenon.
But you still can enjoy the athleticism that such a sport requires.
When we do compete in other sports we fair above average to exceptional (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_t...) with the notable exception of soccer, which we've never broken through despite investment and a decent population of players.
Don't kid yourself, just because other countries don't play American Football doesn't mean the players aren't freak athletes - they are