Will soccer ever become the most popular sport in America?

kick ball... wrote:

We have been hearing for twenty years how soccer will take over and it is almost completely irrelevant still.

We've been hearing it for longer than that. Since AT LEAST the 1970s, we've heard that soccer will surpase football as America's favorite game. "Just look at all the kids playing soccer!" What happens to those kids? They grow up and become football, baseball and basketball fans.

Soccer is on the up BIG TIME

Football is an unstoppable juggernaut

Baseball is dying a slow death

Basketball, while still widely popular, is on the decline but has potential for a comeback

Hockey will always be around but never massively popular

Stick a fork in boxing

MMA will soon plateau after a massive rise in popularity

Golf & Tennis will always have a 'decent' following

I predict soccer will be 2nd only to football in 15 years time.

Soccer (and hockey, for that matter) need to bite the bullet and make some rules changes. Both sports would be infinitely more popular if they looked more like basketball. Eliminate the goalies (even if it means reducing the size of the goals) and scoring will skyrocket; hence making the sport more interesting to American people.

Why do you think MLB ignored juicing for so long and keeps building smaller and smaller ballparks? Because casual fans want to see more home runs and higher scores. It's the same for soccer; only a purest can appreciate a 1 - NIL final. Casual fans want to see double-digit scoring on both sides.

riquelme wrote:

I predict soccer will be 2nd only to football in 15 years time.

Nah. NASCAR will always be more popular than soccer.

This thread pops up on a regular basis.

Will soccer become the most popular team sport in the US measured by organized participation? Yes, I have no doubt that it will and it will happen within 20 years.

Will soccer become the most popular spectator sport measured in TV viewership? That's more questionable. There's enormous amounts of money in football and baseball which have a stranglehold on the sports media. And those two major sports basically have a non-competition pact in that their seasons barely overlap.

Soccer will be challenged to break into that company for a number of reasons:

1. The best leagues are in Europe and that will never change

2. For the MLS to at least become a second-tier league it would need to play a longer season which would really put it at odds with the big sports

3. MLS can't rely on drafting talent out of NCAA - the best youth players are signed by top Euro clubs from age 15-16 and only those who fail would consider the MLS before retirement age

4. The stadium experience is important in soccer and the vast majority of fans will not be even in driving distance of a league team until a proper multi-tier league system is established

5. Not enough commercial breaks in a match to attract the big networks

To those who say it's boring to watch, that's not a valid argument. Sure, the current generations of adult Americans have been indoctrinated to watch sports as a series of discrete plays with measured outcomes, and soccer doesn't fit that. But today's younger generation and future generations will not be that way.

Pele, Esq. wrote:

Soccer (and hockey, for that matter) need to bite the bullet and make some rules changes. Both sports would be infinitely more popular if they looked more like basketball. Eliminate the goalies (even if it means reducing the size of the goals) and scoring will skyrocket; hence making the sport more interesting to American people.

So soccer, the most popular sport in the world, needs to make rule changes in order to appeal to American couch potatoes? WTF are you smoking?

You must be smoking something if you you actually took him seriously.

most Americans get turned off when they decide to check out a rare primetime match on ESPN/ESPN2, maybe for the World Cup, just to see what the sports all about and it ends up a 0-0 tie.

(usually) too boring a sport to watch on TV. like baseball

If college football was gone there'd be a lot mens track and cross scholarships.

I think if you added all the Chinese playing hoops, you would find that soccer is no longer the most played sport in the world.

Most of the Team USA volleyball players "work" in Japan or Italy, because they can't make a living playing VB in the USA.

So there are SOME countries around the world who don't think that SOME of our sports suck.

But just ask the folks in the UK about "football." Considered so low class that fans are not allowed into many pubs.

Basketball will surpass Soccer as the worlds number #1 sport before Soccer becomes the #1 sport in America

The world is becoming increasingly urbanized and densly populated. Basketball thrive in urban areas. Soccer was popular worldwide because all you needed was a ball and an open patch of land. Well, now more and more of the world's population is living in cities where open patches of land are a rarity. Basketball takes up far less space, you can fit many basketball courts in the space for a soccer field.

The worlds two most important countries already greatly prefer Basketball over Soccer. It's the world's 2nd most popular sport. 50 years and it's #1

Some deluded replies in this thread.

Football is untouchable as the most popular sport in the world. Not sure if it will ever be #1 in the US. But it can certainly be #2 behind American Football.

I think it will. Each generation in the US plays more soccer and has more fans than the last. Soccer is a simple to understand yet extremely difficult to master. It is fun to play and beautiful to watch. The entire world loves soccer and the US is just starting to catch on.

When I read people here arguing that soccer is too difficult to follow because of these uninterupted 45 minutes of play then one has to say that average Americans must be really retarded as even the most dull folks in Europe have sufficient attention span.

Few goals in soccer is considered as a plus there (some people there say that there are too many goals in hockey), imagine the joy when your team scores, you can hardly experience it in a sport where people score every minute. But simple brains probably can't wait.

I have never considered soccer as a sport for smart people (actually the opossite) but I see I have to reconsider it after reading an American forum.

another banned poster wrote: So soccer, the most popular sport in the world, needs to make rule changes in order to appeal to American couch potatoes? WTF are you smoking?

It might be the most popular sport in the world, but even diehard soccer fans can't deny that it is not a popular specator sport (at least to casual fans) in the United States. At least not compared to the "Big Three."

I'm not smoking anything; just making an observation. Why did you have to respond to my comment like such a d--khead? If you're a soccer fan, more power to ya. But there's no need to be jerk just because you don't share my opinion.

Everything on this thread was said in the 1970s as well. Soccer will never be a major sport in the US, no matter how much the immigration patterns change.

Bad Wigins wrote:

In a lot of Spanish-speaking countries ... beisbol is #1.

Care to name a lot of such countries?

England and much of its former empire like cricket,

Sure, the English like cricket, rugby union and rugby league. But soccer is the biggest sport there by a very large margin.

Elliptical football and baseball own the western hemisphere and that's that. Except cricket in the caribbean.

And South America is in which hemisphere?

There was no internet in the 70s. You barely watch an NFL game never mind european football.

Now soccer is everywhere. Not only is it live on American televisions but all streams/stats/videos/results are available instantly online.

Immigration has nothing to do with it. Soccer is coming up hard in the US and it ain't slowing down any time soon.

mako wrote:

When I read people here arguing that soccer is too difficult to follow because of these uninterupted 45 minutes of play then one has to say that average Americans must be really retarded as even the most dull folks in Europe have sufficient attention span.

Few goals in soccer is considered as a plus there (some people there say that there are too many goals in hockey), imagine the joy when your team scores, you can hardly experience it in a sport where people score every minute. But simple brains probably can't wait.

I have never considered soccer as a sport for smart people (actually the opossite) but I see I have to reconsider it after reading an American forum.

Soccer is a sport that needs to be watched to determine the ability of most players. Not a stat heavy sport like American football. It is even hard to find assist numbers. A lot of American sports fans here can't watch all the games or highlights and depend on the stats to justify how good a player is. Xavi or Yaya Toure won't have large goal to game ratios, but the influence on the field is enormous. It's almost impossible to judge a holding mid or a CDM without watching a game.

A good comparison would be asking an American football fan to name the top 5 D-Line and O-Line players. I doubt most could name any without consulting the stat sheet. Sacks and Pancakes do nothing to determine their true impact.