You just described the EPL 
Just substitute “England” for “US” and you have the current state of affairs!
The top-tier EPL teams have enormous budgets. Last I saw (this would have been 2007 figures, I believe) Chelsea’s payroll is about the same as the Yankees.
Well, to take one possible measure of popularity, Google for a list of the top few hundred sporting clubs in the world, by revenue. You will see all the NFL and MLB franchises, and a little bit further down the NBA names start appearing. I’m sure you’re right that football is the biggest, but the next two big North American team sports don’t seem to be that far behind.
Meanwhile, throughout the list, starting from near the top, you will see English soccer clubs. But you won’t find a single cricket or rugby club. Clubs in the second tier of English football are richer than any English cricket or rugby club.
Que? The highest paid footballers make more in salary than all but a half-dozen (American) football players. When you take into account the fact that NFL contracts are barely worth the paper they’re written on more than two years down the road, the gap is bigger.
Moreover, the pay is much, much higher at the bottom end of the range. Most players in the nationally televised Arena Football League are essentially semi-pro.
ETA: NBA contracts are, indeed, much richer- but then NBA teams have far fewer players to pay.
There are way more people on an NFL roster (~75) than there are on an association football team. The NBA, MLB, NHL, and NFL all have higher average salaries than the EPL (as of 2006).
The Arena league is irrelevant. You might as well talk about academy players. The minimum salary for rookies in the NFL is around $300,000. I can’t find the low end of salaries in the EPL, but apparently the average salary in the same age range is something like $800,000. I’d imagine that, if you take into account the rookie that make much much higher than the minimum, the two figures are pretty close.
If MLS threw that kind of money at premium players the league would fold within 10 years, so I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.
It’s not irrelevant at all. England, for example, has four professional divisions, and a dozen semi-professional regional leagues. All four professional divisions support professional players.
If you’re talking about the amount of money in the sport, you have to compare the total amount of money, not just the top end.
I think you hit it. We have baseball and golf, followed by Football and then Hockey and basketball. How can you make a toehold in our market when you want then to walk away from a team they have supported their whole lives. When the Tigers are on why do I want to go watch a soccer game. Then the Lions and pistons and then Red Wings. There is no space to fit them in.
Sheesh–I knew the EPL spent a lot, but I never realized how much until I looked at total value and revenue compared to US sports.
Forbes rates the Yankees franchise total value at 1.306 billion US$ (2008 publication–2007 numbers), with 327 million US revenue, and Manchester United at 1.8 billion US total franchise value and 394 million $US revenue (2008 publication–2007)numbers.
So, erm, Man U is out-speculating and out-grossing one of the most profligate franchises in US sports history?
Of course, they’re both losing money…
(my search terms were “yankees revenue forbes” and “manchaester united revenue forbes”)
That’s what people said 20 years ago when I was a kid playing soccer…
I was going to say the same thing. Soccer has been tremendously popular as a kid’s sport in both the US and Canada for at least 25 years.
Exactly. And that doesn’t even take into account college football and basketball which further take up significant shares of the typical American fan’s interest.
They’re different sports.
You know, now that I think on it, you may be right. Ball’s a different shape or something, yeah?
It’s got to be difficult to make a meaningful comparison between the NFL, say, and the EPL, because the EPL doesn’t have a salary cap. The big English clubs’ salary bills are well above the NFL salary cap, if I understand it correctly.
It seems like common sense to me that if (a) soccer somehow became as popular in North America as it is here and (b) North American clubs operated on the same no-salary-cap basis, they would have more money to throw around than English, Spanish or Italian clubs, because their domestic market is six times bigger.
Futsal=soccer? No, they’re totally different. How much do futsal players make?
A futsalary.
That’s not going to happen. They’ve been saying this for decades, and it hasn’t happened yet, and isn’t going to.
Participation and spectation, if that is a word, do NOT necessarily follow. Automobile racing is an immensely popular sport despite the fact that very few people race automobiles. Soccer has been one of the most popular participation sports in North America since before you were born, but is still a B-level spectator sport.
Some sports are both popular as participation and spectator sports (baseball/softball) but then some are more played than watched (soccer, bowling) and some more watched than played (football, figure skating, or most Olympic sports.)
Keep in mind though, that when people bemoan (or applaud, for that matter) the low level of fan interest in soccer in the US, they are always referring to the following of Major League Soccer. It’s doing fairly well, and given another ten or twenty years it actually looks like it might turn into something fairly big both in the US and in Canada (where Toronto is already one of the best-supported franchises and Montreal and possibly Vancouver will have teams in the next four or five years).
But the actual truth, which no one ever seems to want to talk about, is that soccer is already among the most popular sports in America, well ahead of hockey or tennis, but probably still behind basketball and certainly baseball and King Football. And I didn’t use league names in that last sentence for a very good reason - because the popularity of soccer in America has little to do with the success of MLS. When the dismal TV ratings for soccer are brought up, it’s always in reference to ESPN or, less often, FSN. But no one seems to care about the ratings for soccer in Spanish. Add up the numbers for Univision, Telefutura, Galavision and ESPN and FSN and you’ll realize that millions of Americans are now, and have been devotedly following soccer for years. Just because most of those fans are following the Mexican Clausura, or La Liga or highlights from Argentina doesn’t make soccer any less of a big deal - it just seems like it to the English-speaking portion of the country.
I think that also explains the strange hatred that many Americans have for soccer. Ask them what they think of rugby and they likely have little or no opinion. Ask about soccer and they’ll tell you how much they hate it. It’s no stretch to think that a certain level of xenophobia might be at work there. No one hates rugby or cricket because they’re little more than novelties here. But soccer is actually trying to make it big, and that bothers a lot of Americans who don’t want to deal with, as my high school football coach once called it, “that third-world communist sport.”
That is a very good point. Although I’d still put it behind hockey. The allure of the Stanley Cup is huge, even to people who don’t much care for hockey (like me).
But as the #5 sport in the country, soccer doesn’t get a whole lot of respect, which is sad. I’m not a soccer fanatic, but I enjoy it. Although I think a lot of the crap soccer gets comes from a bunch of sportwriters who don’t want to watch soccer.
Tony Kornheiser (as much as I love him), I’m looking at you.