Americans Used to Jeer at Soccer. Now It’s More Popular Than Baseball

“Football is democratic capitalism,” declared Rep. Jack Kemp, a former professional quarterback, “whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.”  

That remark was delivered the first time FIFA gave the nod to the U.S. to host the World Cup. Some nations might have declared a national holiday. When America was awarded hosting rights for the 1994 tournament, it was met with a quip and a sneer. 

“I think it is important for all those young men out there who someday hope to play real football,” Kemp said, “where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands.” 

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As the country charges toward World Cup 2026—with 48 teams, 104 games and three host nations, making it the biggest tournament ever—despite sky-high ticket prices the profile of the game in this nation has never felt loftier.

But for any American under the age of 30 salivating at the thought of the ecstatic spectacle to come, don’t be fooled. The growth of the sport in this country has been a slow, arduous, often self-sabotaging grind.  

When Kemp issued his jibe, I’d recently moved here from the U.K., lured to Chicago fresh out of university by the movies of John Hughes, the music of Public Enemy and the exploits of the Chicago Bears. As thrilling as it was to immerse myself in American sports, English football was my foundational text. Hailing from Liverpool, a town in which the sport is to the city what high-school football is to Texas, I made sense of the world through soccer. I was aware before I arrived that it had outsider status here. 

Still, I was stunned by how hard it was to find like-minded fans. In a national survey of favorite spectator sports released shortly after my arrival, soccer ranked 67th. Tractor-pulling was 66th. One journalist at the time compared the opportunity of hosting the world’s biggest sports event to “holding a major skiing competition in an African country.” 

World Cup ’94 was FIFA’s attempt to seduce its largest untapped audience which remained, like space to Captain Kirk, the final frontier, but Americans were not merely apathetic toward the game—some took a perverse delight in openly despising it.

The moment of truth came on June 16, 1994, when the opening game was held, by chance, at Soldier Field in my adopted hometown of Chicago. 

The night before, my mood ricocheted between the childlike anticipation I always experience on the eve of the World Cup and an unshakable terror that America was throwing a party for a sport I loved—and no one would turn up. National polling undertaken three weeks before had revealed that 71% of Americans were unaware it was about to be played in their country. The possibility that the World Cup would unfurl before empty stadiums felt very real. 

I was feeling too impoverished to spring for a $25 ticket for the opening match, which featured reigning World Cup champions Germany against Bolivia. Yet I felt a need—more than that, a responsibility—to travel down to the stadium to pay witness to the scene, and if needed, help fill in as a background extra to create the illusion of a crowd.  

With a searing sense of relief, I found Soldier Field as abuzz as if the Bears were playing the Packers. Sure, it seemed like half of Baden-Württemberg had traveled to watch the match, along with every Bolivian within 100 miles of Chicago. But there were also thousands of local families gathered at the stadium with a crackling sense of anticipation.

The fact that many in attendance seemed to know very little about what was about to happen felt like nitpicking. That emotion was reinforced by a large screen near the gate broadcasting a video of Tommy Lasorda, then manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, declaring his unshakable belief that even if the country had no idea what the World Cup was, America would win it.

When the U.S. players took the field for the first time, doubt swirled around them. The country lacked a professional league. I laughed as my cheap television made it appear as if they were warming up wearing faux stonewashed denim jerseys. Then a commentator mentioned how the U.S. team was, in fact, wearing faux stonewashed denim jerseys. That’s when I fell in love with those goatee and mullet-sporting risk-takers, the dreamers and pioneers whose fortunes seemed directly tied to the growth of the game.

Thankfully, the U.S. acquitted itself adequately, reaching the first knockout round, when the team was promptly clipped—on July 4, no less—by the eventual winner, Brazil.  

Although television ratings continued to rise after they’d lost, the ultimate impact of the tournament was muted. Those who expected American appetites to be transformed instantly and forever were disappointed. The spike in interest quickly burned off as if the World Cup were a circus that momentarily thrilled before leaving town.  

A year later, when my club team Everton reached the semifinal of a major tournament, I was unable to find a single cable channel carrying the game. Desperate to watch, I ended up calling my father in Liverpool and persuaded him to hold his telephone against the radio so I could hear the broadcast and follow the action—a long-distance connection worth every cent of an eye-bulging bill that took seven months to pay off in installments.   

Each time I chipped away at my football-induced telecom debt, I felt a numbing angst that it was as if the World Cup had never happened. And yet, each tournament since has allowed an ever larger number of Americans to fall in love with the game, leaving an avid, curious, hungry new fan base in its wake, like a rogue wave depositing flotsam on the Atlantic shoreline. 

The Economist recently reported that 1 in 10 Americans now name soccer as their favorite sport, narrowly edging out baseball (9%) as the nation’s third most popular (behind football and basketball). 

How that happened is a complicated story, often credited to the arrival of global billboards like David Beckham and Lionel Messi, but in reality, more attributable to several drivers below the surface.

Prime among them the fact that global soccer is the perfect sport for the internet era. Just as baseball thrived in the golden age of radio, and the NFL boomed once television supplanted it, soccer thrived on the ubiquity of the internet, which empowered Americans to connect to ongoing story lines in real time. Fans in Manchester, N.H., were suddenly able to follow the soap opera at Manchester United, while supporters in Madrid, N.M., could decode the Kremlinological goings-on of Real Madrid. 

Cable television’s evolution into streaming also transformed fandom. Every streaming service craves target-audiences die-hard enough to cough up $10.99 on a monthly basis. Few have proven as devoted as global football fans. I can now watch more Premier League football live from New York City than I could if I switched on the television in England.

The success of the Women’s team gave America what it needed—a football team that could make the nation proud by doing what we love best, kicking ass and taking names.  

The quiet explosion of Electronic Arts’ FIFA franchise (recently rebranded as EA Sports FC) has also been a silent hand in the game’s growth. Unlike its NFL or NBA videogame counterparts, whose popularity is an extension of its fans pre-existing love for those leagues, EA Sports had become a gateway drug, seeding a familiarity of the game, and its Star Wars Cantina of teams, competitions and stars across an entire generation of traditionally American-sports-loving fans who might otherwise have discarded soccer as an adolescent rite of passage. 

The blossoming love affair between American fans and global soccer has not gone unrequited. Over the previous decade, the world’s powerhouse teams—Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Juventus—have become obsessed with America, sensing the virgin terrain, audience size and corporate-sponsor density as the perfect target at which to evangelize their brands. In the summer of 2014, nearly 110,000 fans packed Michigan’s Big House to watch Manchester United and Real Madrid play a preseason game. A number that was eye-popping by European standards.

While those football colossi dreamed of taking over the U.S. market, American sports owners took over the powerhouses. Half of the Premier League teams, including Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool, now have American owners. For good or for bad, these are the minds that will shape the sport’s future. Commercially, the game is about to enter its American century.  

The oddest kicker to all this? Despite the sport’s surging popularity, not much of that enthusiasm has transferred to the U.S. Men’s National Team. Unlike the victorious women, the men have largely underwhelmed in major tournaments. Their failure to qualify for the World Cup in 2018 fractured a sense of hope manifested by the more naive, stone-washed-denim-clad days. 

In the entire span of U.S. participation, the men have won just one World Cup knockout game, a paltry record for a nation that had the ingenuity to put a man in space and invented the Cronut. One incredible moment off a U.S. foot could change all that, making sports bars explode and then dominate TikTok.

Supporting the U.S. team used to be the default for American soccer fans. But as the fan base has become more sophisticated and felt welcome among the global fanbases, something shifted. Nowadays when I fly to London on a Friday night, the plane feels like a party bus—filled with Americans traveling to watch their Premier League favorites in the flesh. 

Where is tractor-pulling now?

Roger Bennett is the founder and CEO of the Men in Blazers Media Network and the author of the football memoir, We are the World (Cup).