Question for the Americans: Is soccer really on the brink of becoming a popular sport in your country? I read that ESPN is investing lots of money into the world cup coverage and reddit is full of related submissions.
It's always been a popular sport in America for amateur players, kids, and women (our women's team is the best in the world). Men's soccer on a professional level is trending upwards, though. In college towns and the like you'll see a handful of people wearing Man U shirts or something. MLS is expanding, and in some cities it catches on rather quickly (Seattle, for instance).
It's still hampered by the fact that we have pretty third-rate players by international standards. The American leagues for gridiron, basketball, and baseball are de facto world championships because the best players in those sports always play here, but in soccer the best club could be English or Spanish or German or Italian, and Americans have a problem with that.
I would say it's a top 4 sport already (displacing hockey) but the top 3 is hard to break into. I suspect it'll displace baseball next.
In NYC, World Cup mania is bigger than I've ever seen for any other sporting event, ever. Everyone is watching the games on their computer during work. This seems to be acceptable behavior because all the managers and CEOs are doing it too.
Every bar in the city with TVs is open early for the early games. The "dive bar" by my apartment installed two flat panel TVs just for the Cup and they never had TVs before. I'm not really a soccer fan but I would say if the sport wasn't popular in the USA before, it is now, and will probably become more popular in the future.
> Question for the Americans: Is soccer really on the brink of becoming a popular sport in your country?
No, but it's slowly trending upwards. Without looking it up, the top American spectator sports are American football, baseball, basketball, NASCAR racing, hockey, golf, and tennis.
The problem is that the best American athletes look to one of top three American sports - if you look at top NBA and NFL players, many of them seem well-suited to futbol, but it's not where the money/popularity/culture is at in the USA yet. As long as the fast and strong American athletes are looking to become running backs, wide receivers, and point guards instead of midfielders and strikers, the game won't reach the height of popularity. But it'll slowly grow in popularity if the U.S. keeps making decent showings internationally. Being a top 5 American sport by 2030 wouldn't surprise me.
After that, it'd really only take one charismatic, transcendental American player for the sport to really break through - if there was an American Pele, Maradona, George Best type player, it'd go a long ways, just like Tiger Woods did for golf, Joe Namath did for American football, Michael Jordan did for basketball, etc, etc. So I could see the game trending up in the rankings, and then it's all about if it gets the one dominant, charismatic force that people fall in love with who kids want to follow in the player's footsteps.
Most top NBA and NFL players are fucking huge, because those sports reward gigantism. Soccer doesn't, with the slight exception of the goalkeeper, because even when the height or size of a Peter Crouch or Per Mertesacker gives you an advantage, being able to run circles around Per Mertesacker or get your defense behind Peter Crouch somewhat mitigates it.
I'm thinking someone like Chris Paul or Rajon Rondo - same height and similar physical build to Cristiano Ronaldo, very fast and tough players with a good idea for spacing and good intuition and decisionmaking. Who knows how they'd take to the game, but I wouldn't be surprised if either could play futbol at the highest level.
It certainly seems to be. Five years ago I didn't hear much of anything from my peers about professional soccer. (But then, five years ago I was 17 ...)
I think his wife became more popular here than he did, because of her show. You can't transplant greatness to get Americans interested in a sport. They must be american, and Americans who constantly beat up on Europeans like Lance Armstrong is always good for American ratings, even if overall Americas interest in cycling is only superficial. But, Lance did make it a lot bigger.
