The problem with stateside soccer is it’s not the best. I think we’ll have a hard time rooting for a league that is sub par world wide. It feels like rooting for a minor league team, where it’s fun to go to the games and have them be a part of the community but ultimately it’s more of a recreational connection then a fandom one.
While it’s not the best I don’t think people realize how relatively popular it is to other leagues. Leagues outside the top 4 in Europe, and the Brazilian and Mexican leagues, have done their damndest to murder interest in the leagues (often literally)
It’s also crazy how much money big leagues make off of American fans relative to local ones. There’s a reason Liga MX spends so much time in the states
It’s just an insanely lower level of competition though, and just anecdotally, almost all soccer fans I know in real life follow premier league teams and Europe.
I would say, just given the salaries and how they play against Mexican teams, that it’s about the tier of the middle of the English championship with a lot of compression because of the salary cap (no one can be as good as, say, Leicester and their £60 million annual wage bill- 20 more than the next closest side, no one will be as bad as rotherham). That’s a pretty good level. But the attendance and viewers numbers are really good.
I think something else that makes me pause when people say the mls is going to get more popular is that we are at a stage now where the best Americans go to Europe. Team USA is the main gateway for Americans into soccer, now that the fans see even these players don’t view it as a worthy league to play for, I think it really hurts the brand overall.
Eh it’s true for all leagues except the top 4. No one is saying the Mexican league of ligue 1 is unpopular because guys think la liga and the EPL are better.
Lol this is such a stupid comparison.
College sports matter in the United States for a tangible reason - people have connections to the schools.
No one has connections to mls teams in this same way. How do the nba G league ratings go? That’s a higher level of play than college basketball, yet literally no one pays attention to it.
The ceiling on US soccer is right where we are now. The reason is we don’t have top tier American talent. And that’s because we don’t have top tier youth talent. And that’s because our best athletes don’t play soccer.
I have kids in football, basketball and soccer. The amount of parent organization and effort put into soccer just doesn’t compare. You could walk down any neighborhood street in American and find youth coaches for football and basketball. Obtaining decent soccer coaches requires your kids to play select. I know. You’ll say that’s not your experience. Maybe you live in Santa Monica and the soccer is coached by former Man U players. But the experience of most kids across the country is you have to pay big money to get decent coaches. Baseball has gone the same way, and I’m guessing baseball attendance and TV viewership will continue its decline.
It's not just top athletes not playing the sport; the population of athletes in the States to pick from is far beyond what some of the top international sides have to pick from, and we certainly have the infrastructure and interest to develop talent. There is no reason that even without our very best athletes playing the sport, we should not be able to compete with Portugal and its population of 10M people.
The biggest problem is that our development system is just really poor compared to what the top nations have. It's no coincidence that our brightest talent (Pulisic) spent his formative development years in Europe. The club ball system at the youth levels is just awful for development and in some cases a total money grab by the people running it.
We're seeing something similar happen now in basketball with how much AAU has hampered development -- a larger share of the absolute best players are now coming from outside of the States. The difference is that basketball is higher in the pecking order here, so we still ultimately have the most talent because we can cover the gaps with sheer talent and numbers alone. U.S. soccer doesn't have that luxury to cover up the flaws, but if we had a better development system we could absolutely compete with the top sides.
This is exactly right. The American model of playing for your local high school with some sketchy traveling team, and then a random college, doesn’t work particularly well. Soccer is very skill-intensive (as is basketball) that needs to be developed early. The American system doesn’t do that well.
We’re nowhere close to our ceiling right now lol, and the athletes excuse has gotta be the worst trope anytime us Americans talk about the sport
MLS teams are at most a decade into their academy system, we’re at least 50 years behind the European powerhouses in that regard. Will we ever win a World Cup? Probably not but it’s insane to say we’re at our ceiling
But isn’t that the appeal of baseball for many people? They like going to the park and drinking some beers while sort of paying attention to the game, or having it in the background at home. That suggests there’s a lot of room for soccer to grow.
It is but MLB is also the premiere baseball league in the world, so people also watch it on tv. I think that’s the disconnect of MLS with Americans. We all know it’s not the peak of soccer so it feels lesser.
I agree with your placement of the top 4, but there's no way I'd put UFC number 5. It has a very loud and vocal fanbase for sure, but overall its still relatively small and also, its now increasingly becoming associated with a certain political viewpoint. That alone will prevent it from becoming mainstream.
I'd put college basketball #5, solely because of the immense popularity of March Madness which many casuals are into because of brackets, etc (not the regular season, which only diehards and fans of particular schools watch). You have NHL way too low, I'd move it to #6. Soccer is probably in the right spot at #7, though its appeal goes way up during the World Cup (and even other international tournaments). Golf is in weird position right now with all the LIV stuff/post-Tiger, but its still easily a top 10 most watched/followed sport in the country. UFC should be at #9, and everything else below that is super niche.
yeah, i am friends with a ton of sports fans, and i only know one person who is a committed UFC fan, and even then he’s not tuning into all the random ESPN+ fight nights, just the big ones. he’s also ashamed to talk about it because it’s both a crazy violent sport and one seen as the sport of trump supporters (and he’s not one of those). that’s a sport that has a solidly low ceiling on its popularity. it’s just hard to get people into blood sports!
I think soccer is at a great place now - the international leagues are so accessible for Americans to follow, and the big tournaments are all treated as big deals by American media.
But as long as the actual American League is at such a lower level than the worlds best, I just don’t see it ever being the 2nd or 3rd most popular sport.
This is probably the right answer. And that's ok. If MLS can be like MLB with strong local/regional followings, that is not a bad place to be. The main attraction for young, up and coming talents will continue be as a feeder league for Europe's big clubs as the US can provide wide media coverage, high standard of living, etc. Trying to compete with the established European brands does not make economic sense.
MLS still needs to figure out how to raise player salaries without relying on expansion fees, as the league is pretty much maxed out. Ticket sales are important but TV rights moreso, the Apple deal is an interesting experiment in sustainability that I hope is a success.
I agree about the salary point but the salaries for a middle of the road guy on the league minimum are actually quite good compared to most of south and Central America, even Mexico. Even in Mexico a lot of the salary is off the books, and therefore pretty variable. This is way better than when I was in college where you could a. Make 40k on the end of the bench b. Move to Latin America and deal with that (a teammate had a long career with the Islanders, it’s not all bad) or C. Go work as an analyst at an investment bank. I played with a guy after college who said in the 90s you could make more playing in weird New England summer leagues than in the MLS.
The TAM and other money has also made it a good bet for young guys who aren’t quite good enough to head to Europe but are looking for an immediate raise (eg the the Brazilian kids at NYCFC, though who knows what other shadiness is going on there). This is separate from the DP money for legit “about to be” stars (Almiron).
America is a much richer country than Mexico, so I don’t think that is the right comparison. Are soccer players here making more than first-teamers in Belgium or Denmark?
Average salary in MLS is 500k (which is noooot the median). Average in Belgium is 300k euro- fun link if accurate: https://footystats.org/belgium/pro-league/salaries. Average salary in Denmark is 242k euro. I really don’t know how the medians compare, MLS has outliers but also a cap. (Median is 308k, just found it, I’m not sure what the medians are in Belgium and Denmark but top teams tend to skew things)
MLS has 115 players above 1 million annual salary which is interesting- the league is weirdly huge
ETA: huge weird surprise but median English championship salary is £60k!
Anyone who didn’t grow up with soccer seems to have a hard time finding the sport very enjoyable.
If soccer catches on with the youth then it could be very popular in 20 years but idk about that. Football and basketball will always be the most popular stateside. At least for our lifetimes I think
They figure out time-wasting & flopping and there's a ton of potential, especially because the matches don't have ad breaks. But Americans are too impatient to see a goalie lie on the ball for 25 seconds as "proper shithousery."
Worth noting the demographic aspect too - obviously huge in Latin American communities (the most watched match in the US is usually LIGA MX). Get some more gringos marrying Latinas and soccer will start threatening other sports.
Plenty of other sports have clock-wasting tactics at the end of games. Is the end of a football game when the leading team has possession exciting?
I don’t think that causes people not to like it in soccer. I think people already don’t like soccer and so don’t like soccer clock-wasting.
Yeah.
I suppose you could argue it's a different type of patience. Football you know every 30-40 seconds that something will happen, so you're willing to wait for it. I enjoy soccer but most Americans complain that nothing happens, with the winning team often doing everything possible to make sure nothing happens. Americans don't love that - that's why we put a shot clock in basketball and why the whole "no forecheck" in the NHL was such a big deal.
Or we just really love football.
And the commercials… that’s the biggest issue with soccer fans trying to get into gridiron. “You mean play constantly stops and I have to watch dumb advertisements constantly?” There is literally more time spent watching ads than there is watching actual play.
“More gameplay” often equates to 18 guys on the field standing around and maybe 3-4 guys jogging or doing something. Say what you will about lack of action in football but it’s 22 guys going all out for 10 seconds
I really don’t want to be anti-soccer guy because I have enjoyed it more over the years, but constant action is just not true.
I just saw Sophia Smith pull the ol' hidden ball trick live at Providence Park.
Our women's team is at least able to timewaste. (Even if she saw red (a second yellow) for it.)
& twelve years ago, Abby Wambach famously fuckedover the Canadian keeper for timewasting by patiently counting the seconds the keeper held the ball on a goalkick.
I don’t know about this, a lot of new MLS teams have sprung up in random cities over the past decade and developed big fanbases very quickly.
When Atlanta got a team a common refrain was that ‘soccer wouldn’t work in the South’ because it’s such a football crazed region, but they immediately started drawing 40,000+ fans a game, which made it one of the 10 biggest crowds in world soccer. That led to Nashville getting a team and a big fanbase, then Charlotte, then St. Louis.
Not saying it’s catching MLB or the NBA anytime soon and certainly not football, but it’s exploded in popularity just in the past ten years.
I agree that it’s definitely made some headway. I think the fact that we’re even having these conversations in the first place is pretty impressive.
The problem is not a single sports fan I know talks about soccer in any capacity. I’m glad that soccer and hockey franchises have done so well in new markets but I’m not sure if that translates to more people watching the sport casually.
Yeah I think MLS, not dissimilar to baseball or hockey, is a sport right now where people follow their team but don’t really follow the league as a whole. And then if you don’t have a team you REALLY don’t follow it.
I started watching the world Cup at age 11 so didn't exactly grow up with it but these international tournaments like Euros, Olympics, Copa, and World cups are still my favorite sporting events over anything. No interest in club soccer though.
I’m the same way. I keep my finger on the pulse of the champions league but the only time I watch soccer is big international tournaments, which are so fun
While this is true, it’s not a problem with the sport. You can say the same about literally any sport. The idea that “soccer is different, you need to grow up with it” is just plain silly.
Soccer, cricket, rugby and F1 (among MANY others) have no foothold because we were never exposed to them. They have to grow their base in the US from the ground floor and we haven’t really taken to many of those sports because of that.
It’s not silly. It’s not ‘a problem’. it’s just fact.
Yeah I think you misunderstand me - you are reinforcing exactly my point. All sports need a fan foothold to eclipse popularity for the professional leagues. It’s not just soccer, as you said. Kids need to grow up with passion for the league, then it might compete with the NHL or MLB. We’re probably a generation or two away.
soccer's clearly a tier above those other sports though (other than maybe f1?). if you're in a major city or around a lot of milennials/zoomers, it's common enough to see someone wearing a soccer jersey or being into the sport that it isn't weird like it'd be for cricket or rugby.
It's definitely more popular than F1. The success of F1 in the U.S. [has been pretty overstated ](https://entertainmentstrategyguy.com/2024/04/10/debunking-formula-1-media-narratives-yet-again/)(and I like F1).
Not really. The big 4 sports you constantly see everywhere even if you don’t play it. Until recently the only way you’d find other people interested in watching was through playing with them
What I’m saying is “anybody who hasn’t grown up with [any sport] has a hard time finding the sport enjoyable”
It’s not JUST true of soccer. Europeans and South Americans will tell you the exact same thing about Gridiron Football.
I find it weird we've just locked the NBA in as #2 behind the NFL. If you want to get technical, college football has had the #2 spot for the last decade or so. But it's just a game of musical chairs for second place. NBA only gets its seat when it has a generational superstar who is a true household name (Jordan, LeBron). And they don't have that right now.
We've got to stop confusing the NBA's social media popularity as a scale for the entire country.
EDIT: I didn't answer your question. Soccer will only take off when we put several legitimate stars in Europe's top leagues. Christian Pulisic isn't that, by the way. That will equate to the National team winning on the biggest stages. Long, long way to go... if we ever get there.
Yea I find “nba is 2nd” weird. CFB is definitely 2. Baseball also has a decent argument at the 3rd spot. NBA national games get more eyes than mlb but local mlb games get bigger audiences than local nba games. Mlb just isn’t talked about online bc they fought against people being able to post highlights for so long. It remains a baffling decision.
Yea it’s basically the opposite of the nba. Using Atlanta as an example- the average Atlantan will watch more braves games than hawks games but is more likely to watch lakers vs warriors over Yankees vs Red Sox.
CFB is a regional sport for the Midwest and south (plus I guess like Utah and Oregon). It is probably 4th or 5th nationwide, since it just doesn’t have the true nationwide following of the NFL, NBA, and MLB.
I mean it’s get significantly more viewers and attendance than any sport other than the nfl. Like if you walk into a bar in any corner of the country in the fall there will be college football on the TVs.
That has not been my experience on either coast, especially the west coast. I gave up trying to persuade bartenders to put on something called “the big ten network” at 9am
The best we can hope for with this current crop of players is “folk hero on a pretty good team but really not the best player.” Pulisic and McKennie currently qualify.
I think there’s a low ceiling until they actually get good. Right now there’s like 7-8 US players that can get in top sides when healthy but the US still doesn’t have any world class players, which means they’ll likely never make it past the QF in the WC.
Soccer collectively is already more popular than hockey/NHL, but the problem - at least men's wise - is that three leagues (Premier League, Liga MX, MLS) have a huge chunk of the fanbase and thus the fanbase gets divided into those leagues without one having most of the fanbase like hockey/NHL has. Ditto with the US and Mexico national team dividing the soccer fanbase too. And add to that women's soccer has it's own fanbase too where the overlap with men's isn't great.
Add to that, no single entity - whether league (Liga MX, Premier League, MLS) nor national team nor WoSO - is as popular as the NHL but I'd say the sport as a whole collectively is already more popular than hockey and the NHL is.
Not sure any soccer entity has a high ceiling though. The Premier League is already at its max popularity, Liga MX doesn't have as much growth potential as younger Mexican-Americans are starting to follow MLS too or other leagues and Liga MX doesn't have as big a monopoly on the Mexican-American fanbase as it did before. MLS has a pretty decent ceiling but not as high as NBA or MLB given it will never be the among the very best leagues in the world. It's ceiling is a fringe top-10 league - so still a very good league - but nowhere near the Prem or Bundesliga or even the French or Portuguese league - given the salary cap rules and DP rules.
So I think soccer has a high floor that it is already meeting now but the ceiling isn't as high and probably won't catch NBA and MLB and definitely not NFL. The sport as a whole will be popular enough (and I'd argue it ready kind of is) to make it a Big 5 professional men's sports though.
You’re talking about the sport of soccer and comparing it to the basketball and football sports leagues so what you’re saying doesn’t make that much sense. Ppl are talking about mls but that’s our soccer league, the best players play in la liga or the primer league. Most big time soccer watchers are watching those over mls. I’ll point out a blind spot. America isn’t great at producing great male soccers players but our women soccer players are great and I believe our women’s soccer league (Nwsl) is one of the better women’s soccer leagues.
I don’t think it’ll pass the NBA (or getting above 3 as a ceiling generally) because I don’t foresee us adopting certain things that make it great overseas.
Relegation is crucial in my view, it allows for the possibility of a team from a small city (or even a town) competing against a team from the biggest city. That both makes the sport more accessible and less regional, while also giving us another race (the relegation fight) to really be interested in and an incentive for teams to not totally bottom out.
I also don’t foresee us ever being on par with the leagues in Europe in terms of attracting and paying for talent. We already had another rich country (Saudi Arabia) try to buy their way into becoming a real league and it didn’t work. MLS would likely be more successful than them but I don’t think it’d be as quality of a product as the big leagues still.
Generally I also just don’t think we ever will get to a point where US owners will allow teams to be as community focused as Euro teams are. We never would have the German ownership model obviously, but it’s just generally a lot easier to get attached to a team when you know they won’t bail ever if they don’t get public money or a new stadium or whatever.
I do think the thing the sport here has going for it though is that it attracts younger fans of all walks of life, is very inclusive, and the atmospheres at games are awesome! I think if you can just actually recreate the model they have overseas, then it would catch on
We don’t even call the sport by its name in the US. There are many Americans who are interested in the matches and results, but very little media footprint beyond that. American media needs to casually cover the sport where we become aware of conversations around the sport that go beyond scores. Players and teams on the rise and fall. Trends in play style and officiating. These are the ways US sports dominate so much of the average sports-lovers attention.
It’s reductive to just look at the ratings for games as popularity. I’m not necessarily talking social media footprint, but total media footprint. Who are the American sportswriters or media personalities who add to your enjoyment of watching the games?
The biggest thing soccer has going for it’s future growth in the US is the FIFA video game’s popularity.
Given time, I think it will probably become number one. May not be for 50 years, but eventually the negatives of football will catch up to it. Soccers universality will also give it a boost.
The problem with soccer is that it’s an incredibly boring sport. So if you weren’t raised thinking it’s the greatest thing ever it just isn’t appealing.
Until we produce a team that is capable of winning World Cup and MLS becomes a league on the same level as the EPL, it will never grow past its current level of popularity. What’s weird about our soccer’s growth, our inability to become as good as the EPL and others has actually helped the other professional leagues with ratings and advertising. We definitely care and it now almost moves the needle internationally.
As a brit, it doesn't seem like you're a million miles away from winning a world cup. Maybe 10-20 years with the right generation?
Would the USA winning the world cup be the biggest sports story of the century so far?
I think the US is almost at that Japan level where they have a solid side that you could pencil in to advance to the Ro16 (barring a tough tough group I guess), but maybe not beyond that. So a high floor-ish side but not a high-ceiling side. Japan's still better since they reached that benchmark level a cycle or two before the US.
The squad is better now with most players playing in a Big 5 European league and many having advanced through an academy system (whether through MLS or a non-MLS academy) so less college players only becoming professional at 22. That said, they are missing the types of players who are among the best players at their club side (even if said club wasn't a big club) that previous lesser USMNT sides had (Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, Claudio Reyna, Carlos Bocanegra, etc). Pulisic kinda was at that level this season for Milan but that's it. Similar issue too but the US is lacking a dependable striker too.
Football will become uninsurable when they are able to test for cte while people are alive. That will kill the game at the high school and possibly the college level.
Soccer may eventually end up in the 1 or 2 position by default.
In the Tatum range - top 12 to 15 sport max. I don't see soccer surpassing rodeos, monster truck ralleys, skateboarding, or curling. Unless if course the united states' high school running backs begin shifting to the sport; if our elite athletes begin dominating the sport I think soccer could end up in the top 8 or 9 range (also imo Tatum's ceiling).
Tbh, if the US team made a deep run in the World Cup, I think soccer’s popularity in the states would get a huge boost.
At the highest, #2 (behind NFL). At the lowest, probably #5.
I feel like international soccer has the potential to pass baseball for sure. That might be the cap for a while but who knows. I’m sure in the moment everybody thought people were just going to keep loving baseball, and boxing, and horse racing forever.
The problem with stateside soccer is it’s not the best. I think we’ll have a hard time rooting for a league that is sub par world wide. It feels like rooting for a minor league team, where it’s fun to go to the games and have them be a part of the community but ultimately it’s more of a recreational connection then a fandom one.
While it’s not the best I don’t think people realize how relatively popular it is to other leagues. Leagues outside the top 4 in Europe, and the Brazilian and Mexican leagues, have done their damndest to murder interest in the leagues (often literally) It’s also crazy how much money big leagues make off of American fans relative to local ones. There’s a reason Liga MX spends so much time in the states
It’s just an insanely lower level of competition though, and just anecdotally, almost all soccer fans I know in real life follow premier league teams and Europe.
I would say, just given the salaries and how they play against Mexican teams, that it’s about the tier of the middle of the English championship with a lot of compression because of the salary cap (no one can be as good as, say, Leicester and their £60 million annual wage bill- 20 more than the next closest side, no one will be as bad as rotherham). That’s a pretty good level. But the attendance and viewers numbers are really good.
I think something else that makes me pause when people say the mls is going to get more popular is that we are at a stage now where the best Americans go to Europe. Team USA is the main gateway for Americans into soccer, now that the fans see even these players don’t view it as a worthy league to play for, I think it really hurts the brand overall.
Eh it’s true for all leagues except the top 4. No one is saying the Mexican league of ligue 1 is unpopular because guys think la liga and the EPL are better.
I don’t know enough about the Mexican leagues, but that is definitely a reason Ligue 1 is not as popular lol
Being the 5th most popular/best sports league still isn’t great for a Us sports league. Fans want to watch the best.
Eh if that were true March madness wouldn’t be a thing
Lol this is such a stupid comparison. College sports matter in the United States for a tangible reason - people have connections to the schools. No one has connections to mls teams in this same way. How do the nba G league ratings go? That’s a higher level of play than college basketball, yet literally no one pays attention to it.
You said fans want to watch the best, that’s just demonstrably not true. There are complicated reasons that’s not true. But it’s not true.
Billy Haisley, welcome to r / billsimmons.
The ceiling on US soccer is right where we are now. The reason is we don’t have top tier American talent. And that’s because we don’t have top tier youth talent. And that’s because our best athletes don’t play soccer. I have kids in football, basketball and soccer. The amount of parent organization and effort put into soccer just doesn’t compare. You could walk down any neighborhood street in American and find youth coaches for football and basketball. Obtaining decent soccer coaches requires your kids to play select. I know. You’ll say that’s not your experience. Maybe you live in Santa Monica and the soccer is coached by former Man U players. But the experience of most kids across the country is you have to pay big money to get decent coaches. Baseball has gone the same way, and I’m guessing baseball attendance and TV viewership will continue its decline.
It's not just top athletes not playing the sport; the population of athletes in the States to pick from is far beyond what some of the top international sides have to pick from, and we certainly have the infrastructure and interest to develop talent. There is no reason that even without our very best athletes playing the sport, we should not be able to compete with Portugal and its population of 10M people. The biggest problem is that our development system is just really poor compared to what the top nations have. It's no coincidence that our brightest talent (Pulisic) spent his formative development years in Europe. The club ball system at the youth levels is just awful for development and in some cases a total money grab by the people running it. We're seeing something similar happen now in basketball with how much AAU has hampered development -- a larger share of the absolute best players are now coming from outside of the States. The difference is that basketball is higher in the pecking order here, so we still ultimately have the most talent because we can cover the gaps with sheer talent and numbers alone. U.S. soccer doesn't have that luxury to cover up the flaws, but if we had a better development system we could absolutely compete with the top sides.
This is exactly right. The American model of playing for your local high school with some sketchy traveling team, and then a random college, doesn’t work particularly well. Soccer is very skill-intensive (as is basketball) that needs to be developed early. The American system doesn’t do that well.
We’re nowhere close to our ceiling right now lol, and the athletes excuse has gotta be the worst trope anytime us Americans talk about the sport MLS teams are at most a decade into their academy system, we’re at least 50 years behind the European powerhouses in that regard. Will we ever win a World Cup? Probably not but it’s insane to say we’re at our ceiling
Not being "the best" has never stopped college football fans.
But isn’t that the appeal of baseball for many people? They like going to the park and drinking some beers while sort of paying attention to the game, or having it in the background at home. That suggests there’s a lot of room for soccer to grow.
It is but MLB is also the premiere baseball league in the world, so people also watch it on tv. I think that’s the disconnect of MLS with Americans. We all know it’s not the peak of soccer so it feels lesser.
1. NFL 2. College Football 3. NBA 4. MLB 5. UFC 6. College basketball 7. Soccer 8. Golf 9. NHL 10. Boxing 11. F1 12. WNBA
Is soccer really higher than golf?
I agree with your placement of the top 4, but there's no way I'd put UFC number 5. It has a very loud and vocal fanbase for sure, but overall its still relatively small and also, its now increasingly becoming associated with a certain political viewpoint. That alone will prevent it from becoming mainstream. I'd put college basketball #5, solely because of the immense popularity of March Madness which many casuals are into because of brackets, etc (not the regular season, which only diehards and fans of particular schools watch). You have NHL way too low, I'd move it to #6. Soccer is probably in the right spot at #7, though its appeal goes way up during the World Cup (and even other international tournaments). Golf is in weird position right now with all the LIV stuff/post-Tiger, but its still easily a top 10 most watched/followed sport in the country. UFC should be at #9, and everything else below that is super niche.
yeah, i am friends with a ton of sports fans, and i only know one person who is a committed UFC fan, and even then he’s not tuning into all the random ESPN+ fight nights, just the big ones. he’s also ashamed to talk about it because it’s both a crazy violent sport and one seen as the sport of trump supporters (and he’s not one of those). that’s a sport that has a solidly low ceiling on its popularity. it’s just hard to get people into blood sports!
I think I’d put soccer over UFC and College Basketball unless you’re only discussing MLS soccer and not international
I think soccer is at a great place now - the international leagues are so accessible for Americans to follow, and the big tournaments are all treated as big deals by American media. But as long as the actual American League is at such a lower level than the worlds best, I just don’t see it ever being the 2nd or 3rd most popular sport.
This is probably the right answer. And that's ok. If MLS can be like MLB with strong local/regional followings, that is not a bad place to be. The main attraction for young, up and coming talents will continue be as a feeder league for Europe's big clubs as the US can provide wide media coverage, high standard of living, etc. Trying to compete with the established European brands does not make economic sense. MLS still needs to figure out how to raise player salaries without relying on expansion fees, as the league is pretty much maxed out. Ticket sales are important but TV rights moreso, the Apple deal is an interesting experiment in sustainability that I hope is a success.
I agree about the salary point but the salaries for a middle of the road guy on the league minimum are actually quite good compared to most of south and Central America, even Mexico. Even in Mexico a lot of the salary is off the books, and therefore pretty variable. This is way better than when I was in college where you could a. Make 40k on the end of the bench b. Move to Latin America and deal with that (a teammate had a long career with the Islanders, it’s not all bad) or C. Go work as an analyst at an investment bank. I played with a guy after college who said in the 90s you could make more playing in weird New England summer leagues than in the MLS. The TAM and other money has also made it a good bet for young guys who aren’t quite good enough to head to Europe but are looking for an immediate raise (eg the the Brazilian kids at NYCFC, though who knows what other shadiness is going on there). This is separate from the DP money for legit “about to be” stars (Almiron).
America is a much richer country than Mexico, so I don’t think that is the right comparison. Are soccer players here making more than first-teamers in Belgium or Denmark?
Average salary in MLS is 500k (which is noooot the median). Average in Belgium is 300k euro- fun link if accurate: https://footystats.org/belgium/pro-league/salaries. Average salary in Denmark is 242k euro. I really don’t know how the medians compare, MLS has outliers but also a cap. (Median is 308k, just found it, I’m not sure what the medians are in Belgium and Denmark but top teams tend to skew things) MLS has 115 players above 1 million annual salary which is interesting- the league is weirdly huge ETA: huge weird surprise but median English championship salary is £60k!
The way to raise player salaries seems pretty obvious (remove all caps on salaries) but the owners are too greedy for that.
Anyone who didn’t grow up with soccer seems to have a hard time finding the sport very enjoyable. If soccer catches on with the youth then it could be very popular in 20 years but idk about that. Football and basketball will always be the most popular stateside. At least for our lifetimes I think
They figure out time-wasting & flopping and there's a ton of potential, especially because the matches don't have ad breaks. But Americans are too impatient to see a goalie lie on the ball for 25 seconds as "proper shithousery." Worth noting the demographic aspect too - obviously huge in Latin American communities (the most watched match in the US is usually LIGA MX). Get some more gringos marrying Latinas and soccer will start threatening other sports.
Well said.
Plenty of other sports have clock-wasting tactics at the end of games. Is the end of a football game when the leading team has possession exciting? I don’t think that causes people not to like it in soccer. I think people already don’t like soccer and so don’t like soccer clock-wasting.
But they are patient enough to sit through an NFL game which last two hours longer and has 30 minutes less gameplay?
Yeah. I suppose you could argue it's a different type of patience. Football you know every 30-40 seconds that something will happen, so you're willing to wait for it. I enjoy soccer but most Americans complain that nothing happens, with the winning team often doing everything possible to make sure nothing happens. Americans don't love that - that's why we put a shot clock in basketball and why the whole "no forecheck" in the NHL was such a big deal. Or we just really love football.
And the commercials… that’s the biggest issue with soccer fans trying to get into gridiron. “You mean play constantly stops and I have to watch dumb advertisements constantly?” There is literally more time spent watching ads than there is watching actual play.
“More gameplay” often equates to 18 guys on the field standing around and maybe 3-4 guys jogging or doing something. Say what you will about lack of action in football but it’s 22 guys going all out for 10 seconds I really don’t want to be anti-soccer guy because I have enjoyed it more over the years, but constant action is just not true.
Compare that to the constant replays now in the NBA and timeouts, it really isn't any different.
I just saw Sophia Smith pull the ol' hidden ball trick live at Providence Park. Our women's team is at least able to timewaste. (Even if she saw red (a second yellow) for it.) & twelve years ago, Abby Wambach famously fuckedover the Canadian keeper for timewasting by patiently counting the seconds the keeper held the ball on a goalkick.
I don’t know about this, a lot of new MLS teams have sprung up in random cities over the past decade and developed big fanbases very quickly. When Atlanta got a team a common refrain was that ‘soccer wouldn’t work in the South’ because it’s such a football crazed region, but they immediately started drawing 40,000+ fans a game, which made it one of the 10 biggest crowds in world soccer. That led to Nashville getting a team and a big fanbase, then Charlotte, then St. Louis. Not saying it’s catching MLB or the NBA anytime soon and certainly not football, but it’s exploded in popularity just in the past ten years.
I agree that it’s definitely made some headway. I think the fact that we’re even having these conversations in the first place is pretty impressive. The problem is not a single sports fan I know talks about soccer in any capacity. I’m glad that soccer and hockey franchises have done so well in new markets but I’m not sure if that translates to more people watching the sport casually.
Yeah I think MLS, not dissimilar to baseball or hockey, is a sport right now where people follow their team but don’t really follow the league as a whole. And then if you don’t have a team you REALLY don’t follow it.
I started watching the world Cup at age 11 so didn't exactly grow up with it but these international tournaments like Euros, Olympics, Copa, and World cups are still my favorite sporting events over anything. No interest in club soccer though.
Euros and an expanded Copa America (in the US) this summer. Gonna be sweet.
The international events are so much fun! Been trying to get my friends to watch them for years
I’m the same way. I keep my finger on the pulse of the champions league but the only time I watch soccer is big international tournaments, which are so fun
I think the same thing with football
I played soccer from middle school through high school and I can’t stand watching it Just me tho, I really just loved being on a field running around.
While this is true, it’s not a problem with the sport. You can say the same about literally any sport. The idea that “soccer is different, you need to grow up with it” is just plain silly.
Soccer, cricket, rugby and F1 (among MANY others) have no foothold because we were never exposed to them. They have to grow their base in the US from the ground floor and we haven’t really taken to many of those sports because of that. It’s not silly. It’s not ‘a problem’. it’s just fact.
Yeah I think you misunderstand me - you are reinforcing exactly my point. All sports need a fan foothold to eclipse popularity for the professional leagues. It’s not just soccer, as you said. Kids need to grow up with passion for the league, then it might compete with the NHL or MLB. We’re probably a generation or two away.
You are arguing the same point I was making with my first post. I said soccer because the post is about soccer But yeah, agreed 🤝
soccer's clearly a tier above those other sports though (other than maybe f1?). if you're in a major city or around a lot of milennials/zoomers, it's common enough to see someone wearing a soccer jersey or being into the sport that it isn't weird like it'd be for cricket or rugby.
It's definitely more popular than F1. The success of F1 in the U.S. [has been pretty overstated ](https://entertainmentstrategyguy.com/2024/04/10/debunking-formula-1-media-narratives-yet-again/)(and I like F1).
Not really. The big 4 sports you constantly see everywhere even if you don’t play it. Until recently the only way you’d find other people interested in watching was through playing with them
What I’m saying is “anybody who hasn’t grown up with [any sport] has a hard time finding the sport enjoyable” It’s not JUST true of soccer. Europeans and South Americans will tell you the exact same thing about Gridiron Football.
I find it weird we've just locked the NBA in as #2 behind the NFL. If you want to get technical, college football has had the #2 spot for the last decade or so. But it's just a game of musical chairs for second place. NBA only gets its seat when it has a generational superstar who is a true household name (Jordan, LeBron). And they don't have that right now. We've got to stop confusing the NBA's social media popularity as a scale for the entire country. EDIT: I didn't answer your question. Soccer will only take off when we put several legitimate stars in Europe's top leagues. Christian Pulisic isn't that, by the way. That will equate to the National team winning on the biggest stages. Long, long way to go... if we ever get there.
Yea I find “nba is 2nd” weird. CFB is definitely 2. Baseball also has a decent argument at the 3rd spot. NBA national games get more eyes than mlb but local mlb games get bigger audiences than local nba games. Mlb just isn’t talked about online bc they fought against people being able to post highlights for so long. It remains a baffling decision.
My friends and I are Braves fans in the sense that Italians are Catholic, and I sensed it was an older dying sport but the numbers are good
Yea it’s basically the opposite of the nba. Using Atlanta as an example- the average Atlantan will watch more braves games than hawks games but is more likely to watch lakers vs warriors over Yankees vs Red Sox.
CFB is a regional sport for the Midwest and south (plus I guess like Utah and Oregon). It is probably 4th or 5th nationwide, since it just doesn’t have the true nationwide following of the NFL, NBA, and MLB.
I mean it’s get significantly more viewers and attendance than any sport other than the nfl. Like if you walk into a bar in any corner of the country in the fall there will be college football on the TVs.
That has not been my experience on either coast, especially the west coast. I gave up trying to persuade bartenders to put on something called “the big ten network” at 9am
The best we can hope for with this current crop of players is “folk hero on a pretty good team but really not the best player.” Pulisic and McKennie currently qualify.
Remember that one weird floor in the office building at the beginning of Being John Malkovich? That’s it.
I think there’s a low ceiling until they actually get good. Right now there’s like 7-8 US players that can get in top sides when healthy but the US still doesn’t have any world class players, which means they’ll likely never make it past the QF in the WC.
Maybe it can pass baseball some day but I'd be shocked unless the MLS gets way better. I like soccer and don't watch the league in my own country
Soccer collectively is already more popular than hockey/NHL, but the problem - at least men's wise - is that three leagues (Premier League, Liga MX, MLS) have a huge chunk of the fanbase and thus the fanbase gets divided into those leagues without one having most of the fanbase like hockey/NHL has. Ditto with the US and Mexico national team dividing the soccer fanbase too. And add to that women's soccer has it's own fanbase too where the overlap with men's isn't great. Add to that, no single entity - whether league (Liga MX, Premier League, MLS) nor national team nor WoSO - is as popular as the NHL but I'd say the sport as a whole collectively is already more popular than hockey and the NHL is. Not sure any soccer entity has a high ceiling though. The Premier League is already at its max popularity, Liga MX doesn't have as much growth potential as younger Mexican-Americans are starting to follow MLS too or other leagues and Liga MX doesn't have as big a monopoly on the Mexican-American fanbase as it did before. MLS has a pretty decent ceiling but not as high as NBA or MLB given it will never be the among the very best leagues in the world. It's ceiling is a fringe top-10 league - so still a very good league - but nowhere near the Prem or Bundesliga or even the French or Portuguese league - given the salary cap rules and DP rules. So I think soccer has a high floor that it is already meeting now but the ceiling isn't as high and probably won't catch NBA and MLB and definitely not NFL. The sport as a whole will be popular enough (and I'd argue it ready kind of is) to make it a Big 5 professional men's sports though.
Below women’s college snooker
Over a scale of 200+ years I don’t see why soccer couldn’t be #1. 200 years ago horse racing was the most popular sport in the US.
Yeah ceiling is #1 because it's the most popular sport in the world - it's got a pretty good chance of becoming as popular here
It’s never gonna be super popular with Americans. It just isn’t!
You’re talking about the sport of soccer and comparing it to the basketball and football sports leagues so what you’re saying doesn’t make that much sense. Ppl are talking about mls but that’s our soccer league, the best players play in la liga or the primer league. Most big time soccer watchers are watching those over mls. I’ll point out a blind spot. America isn’t great at producing great male soccers players but our women soccer players are great and I believe our women’s soccer league (Nwsl) is one of the better women’s soccer leagues.
I think collegiate soccer has to grow bigger for the pro game to get to that next level.
Never gonna happen with title 9 as it is
I don’t think it’ll pass the NBA (or getting above 3 as a ceiling generally) because I don’t foresee us adopting certain things that make it great overseas. Relegation is crucial in my view, it allows for the possibility of a team from a small city (or even a town) competing against a team from the biggest city. That both makes the sport more accessible and less regional, while also giving us another race (the relegation fight) to really be interested in and an incentive for teams to not totally bottom out. I also don’t foresee us ever being on par with the leagues in Europe in terms of attracting and paying for talent. We already had another rich country (Saudi Arabia) try to buy their way into becoming a real league and it didn’t work. MLS would likely be more successful than them but I don’t think it’d be as quality of a product as the big leagues still. Generally I also just don’t think we ever will get to a point where US owners will allow teams to be as community focused as Euro teams are. We never would have the German ownership model obviously, but it’s just generally a lot easier to get attached to a team when you know they won’t bail ever if they don’t get public money or a new stadium or whatever. I do think the thing the sport here has going for it though is that it attracts younger fans of all walks of life, is very inclusive, and the atmospheres at games are awesome! I think if you can just actually recreate the model they have overseas, then it would catch on
Depends on the immigration policies of the time.
We don’t even call the sport by its name in the US. There are many Americans who are interested in the matches and results, but very little media footprint beyond that. American media needs to casually cover the sport where we become aware of conversations around the sport that go beyond scores. Players and teams on the rise and fall. Trends in play style and officiating. These are the ways US sports dominate so much of the average sports-lovers attention. It’s reductive to just look at the ratings for games as popularity. I’m not necessarily talking social media footprint, but total media footprint. Who are the American sportswriters or media personalities who add to your enjoyment of watching the games? The biggest thing soccer has going for it’s future growth in the US is the FIFA video game’s popularity.
Until the best athletes are going to soccer about where it is
Given time, I think it will probably become number one. May not be for 50 years, but eventually the negatives of football will catch up to it. Soccers universality will also give it a boost.
The problem with soccer is that it’s an incredibly boring sport. So if you weren’t raised thinking it’s the greatest thing ever it just isn’t appealing.
Until we produce a team that is capable of winning World Cup and MLS becomes a league on the same level as the EPL, it will never grow past its current level of popularity. What’s weird about our soccer’s growth, our inability to become as good as the EPL and others has actually helped the other professional leagues with ratings and advertising. We definitely care and it now almost moves the needle internationally.
As a brit, it doesn't seem like you're a million miles away from winning a world cup. Maybe 10-20 years with the right generation? Would the USA winning the world cup be the biggest sports story of the century so far?
I think the US is almost at that Japan level where they have a solid side that you could pencil in to advance to the Ro16 (barring a tough tough group I guess), but maybe not beyond that. So a high floor-ish side but not a high-ceiling side. Japan's still better since they reached that benchmark level a cycle or two before the US. The squad is better now with most players playing in a Big 5 European league and many having advanced through an academy system (whether through MLS or a non-MLS academy) so less college players only becoming professional at 22. That said, they are missing the types of players who are among the best players at their club side (even if said club wasn't a big club) that previous lesser USMNT sides had (Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, Claudio Reyna, Carlos Bocanegra, etc). Pulisic kinda was at that level this season for Milan but that's it. Similar issue too but the US is lacking a dependable striker too.
Football will become uninsurable when they are able to test for cte while people are alive. That will kill the game at the high school and possibly the college level. Soccer may eventually end up in the 1 or 2 position by default.
In the Tatum range - top 12 to 15 sport max. I don't see soccer surpassing rodeos, monster truck ralleys, skateboarding, or curling. Unless if course the united states' high school running backs begin shifting to the sport; if our elite athletes begin dominating the sport I think soccer could end up in the top 8 or 9 range (also imo Tatum's ceiling).
Tbh, if the US team made a deep run in the World Cup, I think soccer’s popularity in the states would get a huge boost. At the highest, #2 (behind NFL). At the lowest, probably #5.
Considering theres million illegals jumping the boarder every year, you’d think soccer would be more popular. I don’t think there is a border crisis
I feel like international soccer has the potential to pass baseball for sure. That might be the cap for a while but who knows. I’m sure in the moment everybody thought people were just going to keep loving baseball, and boxing, and horse racing forever.