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.