I was being a bit tongue in cheek earlier, though soccer is growing in the USA. Looking from the outside in (as someone who talks to a lot of US fans regularly on another board) I could see it maybe surpassing hockey in popularity as a spectator sport in a few years. The only real obstacle this I see is that the NHL is the best ice hockey league in the world (though it is the only North American sport where foreign leagues aren’t that far behind), whereas the MLS isn’t even in the top 10 leagues in the World (its quality has been steadily improving since its inception, but it faces big hurdles to reach its ambition of being one of the big boys, e.g. being in CONCACAF rather than UEFA.
For soccer to seriously challenge american football would probably take some outside influence like concerns over head injuries.
This is why I mentioned soccer to begin with. Soccer is very popular with kids so most American adults don’t really understand the advanced strategies of the game. By the time kids make it to Middle School and High School soccer is virtually unheard of and King Football takes over. But with the concerns over injuries it may be that schools make the change to promote soccer over football. It makes sense because we already have a strong youth soccer program. Kids are skilled and comfortable with the game. The schools already have football stadiums which can easily be shared with soccer. All that really remains is for schools to heavily promote soccer and for spectators to learn advanced strategy so they can actively enjoy watching the games. The fact that soccer is so popular worldwide is a further draw.
MLS is a neat little league but, no, it’s not comparable to those leagues. The entire league’s revenues aren’t what the NHL gets from three or four Canadian teams.
As popular as soccer is it is inescapably the fact that MLS is a minor league in the world of soccer. It’ll always be up against that disadvantage.
At this point, I don’t even think the MLS is as popular, relatively-speaking, in the US as the North American Soccer League was. Yes, it’s more popular now than it was at it’s nadir, but so is F1, but both shared the problem of having absolutely nowhere to go but up.
The big problems I see are that the US market doesn’t seem to care much for sports that they’re not dominant in (we can accept being a close #2 to Canada, but that’s about it), and, perhaps more importantly, we want lots of scoring–that’s not just the NFL, pretty much every pro sport has tended towards rule changes favoring more offense. 0-0 and 0-1 games are not going to get the job done here.
Now, one thing that may help in the long term is the increasing Hispanic influence in the country. I did see that in the $83 mil/year contract for NBC Sports that it included broadcasts on Telemundo. That may be the best hope for soccer in the US.
Beyond that, if football does go bust, you may well just end up with a bunch of smaller sports getting slightly bigger, rather than any other sport rising to take the dominant position (heck, I’d love to see pro volleyball leagues in the US, or even some handball).
Hmm well I’m not very knowledgeable about it all, but it doesn’t seem like it’s worthy of laughing at. But I can understand that people are going to be resistive to changing the rules and equipment of the sport. But if it means saving people from long-term brain damage, while preserving as much of American football as possible, it might be the best solution.
And give up on the silly Rounders game so we can move up to Cricket? Yeah, I doubt it. If anything, US-style alt-rugby would adopt the offside rule from soccer, so that a pass could be thrown forward, as long as the receiver was onside (behind the passer) when it was thrown.
Premiere League and other top-flight international soccer might be gaining viewers, but the brand of soccer children usually learn to play here in the USA is almost a different game. U.S. college soccer is not very good either… and MLS is not a whole lot better.
Americans will always have some interest in world-class soccer. But we will never play soccer at that level until and unless the majority of gifted American youth athletes choose to play soccer. I don’t see that happening–even if American football were to somehow disappear tomorrow.
High-level, quality soccer can not be properly played on an American football field. Schools would have to invest in dedicated soccer pitches if they wanted to take the game seriously.
According to Wikipedia, a soccer field is 100-130 yards by 50-100 yards. It would require no modification to turn a football field into a soccer field and only slight modification to turn one into a high-level field.
That’s only true here in the US, and only because the Spice Girls were more popular than soccer here. Beckham is/was a huge deal worldwide because he was one of the best soccer players who played for the premier team in one of the premier leagues in the world. Sort of like Alex Rodriguez playing for the Yankees or Kobe Bryant playing for the Lakers, only even more famous and big-time.
IIRC, the big deal was that David Beckham, world famous soccer star was marrying Posh Spice, lesser pop star, not the other way around.
And if football takes a sudden nosedive, I think soccer will gain quite a bit in popularity, but I suspect basketball will become THE big sport, with baseball and soccer duking it out in the summer. (yes, we play summer pro soccer here.) If the MLS was to shift to a September-March season, I think it would get a lot of viewership in the fall, and some in the spring before we’d have baseball and basketball to contend with at the same time.
Hate to rain on this parade, but incidence of concussions in soccer is near, or equal to that in football (1, 2, 3), with females at greater risk/incidence (1, 2, 3, 4)