What country? Texas country.
Looks like football is pretty much the most popular sport in Israel.
Flyover Country!
There’s an article on the Economist right now looking at the popularity of soccer in China, India, Indonesia and, sort of, the US. It contains a chart of 2010 World Cup Audience Reach for 16 countries, defined as the percentage of the population tuning in for 20 consecutive minutes. ~85% for Japan, 70% for the UK, 30% for the US, etc. India is down at the bottom with an Audience Reach of around 5%.
Qualified by default in 1950 as the last competing Asian team, but also withdrew before the actual tournament started.
Trust me, based on the amount of Brazilian and Argentinian flags that have popped up in people’s windows in the past few weeks, and the fact that no-one is talking about anything else, The Mondial (as we call the World Cup) is a *huge *deal in Israel.
Bolding mine, this is not necessarily the case. America was in the 1999 Rugby World Cup. I sent a sports-mad friend this challenge “America has a national team playing in a World Cup competition right now, can you tell me what sport?”. He couldn’t find anything on the networks or websites.
As to point #2: If we ever field an international Cricket squad, don’t expect much enthusiasm here.
As to soccer:
The notion that the USA, collectively, is at best utterly disinterested in soccer, and at worst actively hostile to it, is a joke that’s been outdated for 20, if not 30 years.
I suppose there was a time in the 80’s when you’d be hard-pressed to find any American (outside of various immigrant communities) who gave a shit about soccer, but those days are long gone. I remember in high school Spanish class having to read a bit about Diego Maradona and his performance in the '86(?) Cup. Prior to that assignment, I’d never heard of Maradona and wasn’t even aware that there had been a soccer tournament of some significance. The same would have been true for 99.99% of my classmates.
During this time, soccer had apologists inside and outside the US who basically took the approach that our dislike of soccer was based on jingoism and xenophobia; that may have been true, but that’s not the best way to make your point. They preached “Soccer is the most popular sport in the world! You have to embrace soccer in order to be a good world citizen!” I assure you, the quickest way to get on an American’s bad side is to tell him he needs to do something for the good of the outside world.
I think this fervent evangelism for soccer left a bad taste in a lot of Americans’ mouths about the sport; a bad taste that lingers, in many, to this day.
However, 1994 changed a lot of that. We hosted the tourney, our stadiums were packed, and our team did reasonably well. We started a league that is popular, and growing, to this day.
Will soccer ever be the most popular sport in the US? Unlikely, but not out of the question.
Is soccer an afterthought, at best, in the US sports scene? Not any more.
Will there be Americans who utterly disdain soccer? Of course, but are there not Brazilians, Mexicans, Europeans, etc. who utterly disdain soccer, too?