No. You greatly overestimate the popularity of basketball & baseball. Soccer trounces basketball & baseball in popularity outside the U.S.
That’s PROBABLY accurate, but it’s hard to be sure. A Japanese baseball player may make less money than he could in the US, but he’s still making a very nice paycheck in his homeland.
Try this hypothetical: suppose Derek Jeter could earn MORE money playing for, say, the Nippon Ham Fighters. Or, suppose LeBRon James received a phenomenal offer to play in Tel Aviv. Would money be the ONLY consideration? Of course not. He’d have to move halfway around the world and live in a society where he doesn’t speak the language and doesn’t fully fit in.
For all we know, there could be dozens of Japanese players good enough to be starters in MLB, but who don’t think the extra money is worth moving so far from home.
Apparently not. 
Though, am I correct in remembering that there hadn’t been a Grand Prix race in the U.S. for some years before that race in '07?
I think they raced at Indy from 2000-2007. There are rumors of a possible street course race in New York or Las Vegas, but I can’t see it happening anytime soon.
The argument that basketball doesn’t count as an international sport because it’s not as popular as football (of the kind involving striking the ball with the foot more than a half-dozen times per game) strikes me as odd: no other sport is near football’s status as an international sport either.
Basketball is as reasonable a choice for #2 as any other, except maybe tennis or golf, and the US just can’t compete with the mighty Swiss talent pool in tennis.
Actually, given it’s popularity across the Commonwealth, I would put Cricket as #2.
I take it that you are not aware that there are different levels to the World Championships? Just because you want to play doesn’t mean you can play. IIRC after every championship one country drops down to the lower level and one gets promoted up.
In fact I just looked it up. There are four divisions:
Five of the eight countries you listed (Australia, Scotland, Ireland, England, New Zealand) play in lower divisions. Hell, even Greece and South Africa have national ice hockey teams that play in the championships. Do they even have ice in those countries?
Hey, we kick the ball more than that!
Why, in yesterday’s Green Bay - San Francisco game, there were:
- 4 field goal attempts
- 6 extra point attempts
- 11 kickoffs
- 10 punts
That’s 31 kicks! OK, granted, that’s out of a total of 156 plays in the game, but still! 
The intensity of support for pro-teams in the US, at least in some cities, approaches that of support for national teams in European countries. When Pittsburgh plays, it is way more important to Pittsburghers than Feyenoord playing is to Rotterdammers. If the Superbowl were every 2 or 4 years, playing in it might, for that city, rival a country playing in the semi final or final of the EC or WC.
IMO intensity ladder Rotterdam/Holland (soccer) vs Pittsburgh (NFL):
Holland plays Germany EC or WC semi-final or final
Holland plays EC or WC Semifinal or final
Pittsburgh in superbowl
Holland plays Germany, any non-friendly match
Pittsburgh in AFC Championship
Holland plays in elimination round EC or WC
Pittsburgh plays Cinci, Baltimore or Cleveland
Feyenoord in Champion’s league final (yeah, right)
Holland in WC EC first round (non-elimination)
Any Pittsburgh game
Holland in WC EC qualifying game (unless it’s do-or-die, then it moves up a notch)
Feyenoord-Ajax
Feyenoord - any
Pittsburgh is of course not entirely representative of an NFL city, but then Holland tends to go a little more nuts than most European countries as well.
Feyenoord is possibly a poor choice, but it reflects personal experience - I believe the list holds if you substitute Ajax.
Even so, I assure you basketball is still not number 2. Indians alone probably play more cricket than the World minus USA play basketball.
But the point is not just popularity, it’s uniformity of popularity. Basketball is played in the US more than anywhere else in the world, and at the top level there’s the NBA, a massive gulf, and then everyone else. Okay, so the States get beaten every so often at the Olympics, but let’s face it, it’s because they often can’t be fucked to turn up. There’s no thriving international scene in any US sport, whereas, for example, cricket is so based around the international game that many people who call themselves cricket fans will hardly be able to name their nearest domestic team’s first XI.
It’s a history and tradition thing. International competition naturally has more cachet, but it has to be on at least vaguely equal terms to be worthwhile, and just because of the way they’ve grown up, American sports don’t have that opportunity. I’m not sure it’s something that should be missed, or regretted; it just so happens that the popular American sports already have their talent concentrated in the domestic market, meaning the attraction of international competition is lost.
I think the size/population discussion is relevant, but not in the way that it was being made. Yes, there are countries that are more or less of similar size and population, but they’re still not like the US at all. Compared to the US, many other countries are much more homogenous culturally and regionally. Driving from, say, Boston to New Orleans, you will encounter as many different cultures as you will driving a similar distance in Europe. The US has very strong regionalism that really is much closer to being like Europe as a whole than like another large country. Yes, the regions often don’t follow state lines, but they’re very real.
As an example, if I run into someone from out of the country and I ask them where they’re from, they’re almost always “from Germany” or “from Romania”; they will occassionally say a major city, but that’s the minority. Meanwhile, Americans identify with where they’re from, I’m “from Virginia” and while they may or may not have any idea where it is, they still at least know where it’s from. I have a hard time even imagining how I feel almost as much out of place in New England or the Mid-West as I do out of the country.
The point is, I feel a much greater amount of attachment to my local area and my local teams than I ever could a national team. And on top of that, there’s already more sports than most people could be bothered to keep up with. For Northern Virginia, counting DC as our home team of course, we have a team in all 4 major sports, a soccer team that is apparently pretty decent, and several colleges that are pretty decent in different sports. If you extend it to Baltimore (since we used to steal their baseball and they stole our football), you have another two teams in major sports and even more schools. In fact, there’s at least 2 channels on cable that JUST cover local sports 24/7. Where are we to find time in our lives and space in our hearts for some national team that we’re necessarily less attached to than our local teams?
But wouldn’t you feel attached to a Virginia “national” team? Consisting of the best players from Virginia, regardless of who they played for in their day jobs? I can’t help thinking that US sports fans would get quite excited about match-ups between state-level “dream teams” like this, and that is equivalent to what does actually exist in other sports. Somehow we fit it in around all the club-level international and domestic competitions.
I think one might get excited about this if one were from California or Florida (and maybe Texas); it seems like a disproportionate number of pro athletes come from those states. Plus, at least for basketball and football, that niche may already be filled by college ball.
That’s because we don’t assume you’ll know where these places are. Modern culture means people probably know many of the US states by name (but not all of them) but many people’s knowledge of the areas of Germany and Romania are a lot poorer, so they go with the country name.
And yes, this includes large countries like Brazil, Australia, Canada and India. Hell, I couldn’t name a single region of Brazil.
Really? I’d heard that (for instance) Wembley stadium sold out for a preseason game at the beginning of last year (Dolphins and…somebody?).
Is it just viewed as a curiosity, then? Why does it seem like the NFL has grandiose plans to expand outside the US market?
Hmm, got to dispute some of this. For a start I think you underestimate the variety in Europe. Yes, the US varies but not by nearly as much in comparison. And yes, I have travelled in the US, before anyone asks.
Secondly, you seem to believe that countries in the rest of the world - especially Europe - don’t have strong regionalism. Of course we do. It is just that national sports are another excuse to get all wound up about sport, something we really enjoy doing. I won’t speak for other countries, but I know in my native UK your domestic side always, without fail, comes before the national side. As an example, I’m a Coventry City fan (I grew up just outside Coventry) and I’d happily see England never win a game again if it meant Coventry would get promoted back to the Premiership.
International sports doesn’t take the place of domestic sports, it is in addition to it. It adds a bit of variety.
Now that I think of it, with European countries having such higher population density than the US I’d say there is a much higher chance of people supporting a team that is not their local team. Extreme example, but in London there are thirteen professional football teams. Five of them are in the Premiership (the top league in England). Is there any city in the US that can say they have five teams at the highest level of a sport in the US?
Thus your neighbour, the people down the pub or whatever have a high chance of being supporters of another team. Getting behind your national team gives you a chance to all get behind the same team every so often. And that is the fickle nature of sports fans - for a long time I remember Beckham being one of the most hated men in domestic English football (hell, the entire Man Utd team was hated) but as soon as he put on an England shirt everyone loved him for the afternoon.
One-offs are easy to sell out. In a country of sixty million it shouldn’t be hard to find 80,000 people to go to a match if they think there is a good chance they’ll never see the teams again. The big question is whether they could consistently bring in a large crowd.
There’s a couple problems with international competition and this analogy. Much like what happens in a lot of NCAA sports, in international competition there’s a few interesting matchups, but the majority of the rest of games are generally guaranteed blowouts. Sure, there’s some good athletes from Virginia, but we’d get blown out by California, and we’d probably equally crush a lot of smaller states, go on to compare that to other countries and it’s much the same.
The wonderful thing about parity in the way our sports leagues is, sure, my team may suck this year, but a few key pickups and a nice draft and we could easily be in the title hunt next year. You can’t say that if you’re a soccer fan from a place like Bulgaria; hell, they’re happy just to qualify for the World Cup, aren’t they? Meanwhile you have other countries, like Brazil, that are perenial favorites, so I can understand their enthusiasm in internation. There’s no way to have any sort of parity in a system like that.
On top of that, as others have also mentioned, I think, a lot of the sports we care about just don’t have a real international presence. If I were a soccer fan, knowing that the World Cup is the real pinnacle of the sport, I might be more interested in that than MLS, but I’m not. The best players in all four major sports all play in our national league. If there were a World Football League or the Baseball Classic was worth anything, we might have more interest in international competition, but there just isn’t.
So really, unless the US warms up the soccer, or one of the other sports picks up a lot of momentum in other countries, there just isn’t any reason to see international competition as meaningful.
Actually, they’ve played regular-season games there the past two years (as well as one in Mexico City a couple of years ago). And, yes, there’s a fair amount of talk about putting an NFL franchise in London.
I’m not sure how big the fan interest is in the U.K., but the NFL’s been trying to build interest over there for 20 years now – first with pre-season games, then the various permutations of NFL Europe, and now regular-season games.