Cars have artificial controls that are relatively easy to simulate. Any sport where the primary impact is full human body mechanics is not likely to have a sim with transferable skills.

Car racing. In car racing as a driver you typically get your input through your seat and steering wheel. Due to lack of g-forces in typical simulator this is all compressed to force feedback in steering wheel. There are really powerful steering wheels that have very high definition of vibration and forces they can transfer and this gives a lot of information about how the car is doing on the track, whether you are loosing or already lost the grip.

I’m not saying a sim is like real racing. I’m saying that human-car interface allows for play-control that maps to the real activity in a way a soccer or snowboarding game never can.

I wonder if you could achieve something vaguely approaching reality with vr and limb tracking, and some weird "soccer ball on a string" gizmo tied into the simulation.

Soccer seems like it's on the other corner of the "implementation difficulty" matrix from racing.

It's pretty easy to hook up a ffb steering wheel and pedals to a computer, actually simulating the cars and track is the hard bit.

In soccer the actual simulation would be pretty simple - it's an elastic sphere bouncing around a fairly uniform surface and being hit by mostly solid body parts/boots without too many interacting parts. But putting the user into the world in a way that they get the necessary physical feedback is much harder.