The following is a part of DSYoungEsq’s excellent post in a related recent thread, "Why did ‘soccer’ not catch on in the US/Canada?’ (I’d have linked to it directly if I knew how):
"Why, then, is soccer not popular here? The reasons are two:
A) Americans had a popular pasttime already when soccer’s popularity was exploding elsewhere (namely, baseball).
B) Soccer lost to the “Rugby” philosophy, which took over American college football.
Soccer’s world-wide popularity came about mostly through the spread of the game by English mercantile and manufacturing establishments overseas during the very late 1800’s and early 1900’s. England had a large mercantile presence in several European countries, namely Italy, Spain and Portugal (surprise, surprise that these three are among the five or six best countries consistently in Europe). It also had a lot of business in Argentina and Brazil (hmmm, do we see a trend here), not to mention Uruguay (winners of two World Cups themselves). And, of course, it had lots of connections in various parts of Africa. At the time of the spread in popularity, these countries didn’t have their own “national” sports. The working class in these countries readily adopted the sport, largely because of its simplicity and lack of expensive necessary equipment.
America, of course, didn’t have a large English mercantile establishment here in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Further, America had baseball, which experienced its own growth over virtually the same years as the growth of soccer in England and, later, the “world.” By 1901, we had two major leagues and several minor leagues of baseball. Baseball ate up our desire for a past time. Similar results occurred in Canada (hockey, Canadian football, and (gulp) curling), Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, etc. where baseball is king, Australasia (Aussie rules football, among other things), the Indian subcontinent (which adopted cricket from the English upper class that ruled it, but not soccer from the English middle and lower class that avoided the area when possible).
And still, soccer might have caught on here, if it wasn’t for the fact that the American colleges opted to go much the same route as “Oxbridge,” adopting the more physical version of football pioneered at Rugby School in England. Soccer was widely played in the US in the late 1800’s, and even as late as the 1930’s it was popular and we were relatively good at it (we were semifinalists at the first World Cup in 1930). But the Ivy League and, following their footsteps, the other well-known colleges chose to promote the version of the game where you could grab an opposing player and force them to give up the ball. By the time of WWII, American football was immensly popular in its collegiate form, so much so that it ended up being used as a tourism draw (bowl games). The fan base had built up through a generation of indoctrination at the “local” level.
Thus, we already had one national sport occupying our time during spring and summer, and we chose a different version of football to occupy our fall, mostly because we preferred to imitate the “highbrow” English colleges rather than the “lowbrow” working class. By the time the World Cup had helped establish the tremendous popularity of soccer in Europe and Latin America, we had no need of it in America.
There is one other factor that, in my humble opinion, plays into the lack of soccer as a national sport here: climate. In most of the parts of Europe where soccer became immensly popular, the winter climate allows the game to be played all winter long. In most of the highly populated areas of America (early 1900 demographics), winter prevents the playing of soccer because of cold and snow, and summer makes playing the sport difficult because of heat and humidity (which is why baseball is such a lazy sport most of the time). Now, of course, as soccer in such places as Russia and Nigeria shows, you can overcome these problems, but usually only because you have nothing else to fill the gap. "
