Football is the most popular sport in the world.
Although you would never know it in the United States, football boasts an astonishing 4 billion fans worldwide, over half of the world’s population. Fans from England to Nigeria and China to Iran all revere football as “the beautiful game.” Here in the U.S., we call it “soccer.”
Every four years, the world comes together to celebrate it at the World Cup, arguably the most important sporting event in the world. Unless you’re from the United States, because in 2018, the U.S. Men’s National Team wasn’t invited to the party. We stayed at home, failing to qualify.
Was this because our team didn’t play well enough? Was the competition too tough to overcome? Could we just blame the manager for this disaster?
All of those may be factors, but the truth to our team’s failure lies on the home front. America does not care enough about soccer. And that’s a problem, both for American soccer culture and for America’s standing abroad.
Last week, the USMNT secured a critical win over Mexico in its effort to qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. A crucial game against its archrival, it still failed to beat out the concurrently airing NBA regular season game between the Golden State Warriors and the Chicago Bulls in viewership.
Yet the USMNT fields arguably the best team it has ever seen, with superstars like Christian Pulisic, Zack Steffen and Weston McKennie playing for giant European clubs Chelsea, Manchester City and Juventus respectively. The team is rankedNo. 13 in FIFA’s international men’s soccer rankings, making it a real contender in the coming World Cup. Yet, the bright prospects are dulled by the country's daunting history; the U.S. has made it to the quarterfinals once since 1930, and missed the competition entirely from 1950 to 1990.
Even with the USMNT’s struggles, the U.S. Women’s National Team is wildly successful, having won four World Cups, four Olympic gold medals and eight CONCACAF Gold Cups, making it by far the winningest women’s soccer team in the world.
Yet only 7% of Americans say soccer is their favorite sport — and that number is vastly higher among liberal, young people, lower among moderate or conservative people and virtually nonexistent for people over 55. American Football and basketball are massively more popular among all groups.
The collective apathy for soccer creates issues for not just international soccer and Major League Soccer, whose viewership is rising but is still significantly lower than the NFL or NBA, but for the whole culture of soccer in America. Even at the high school level, soccer is squarely behind football, track and field, basketball and baseball for boys and behind track and field, volleyball and basketball for girls.
From an American culture spot, this is unsurprising. The U.S. has never been a bastion of soccer love. But it is the world’s game, and we live in an increasingly global society. American competition in international men’s soccer would do wonders to increase prestige worldwide. Sports have never been just sports, or this column couldn’t possibly exist. Soccer is the world’s game, and America has a responsibility to the world. We’ve failed that duty in many ways, but let’s start by acting like it on the field.
