I‘ve read somewhere that soccer is the most played sports by kids in the US, and one of the most played high school sports.
With the US having a population of 340 million and so many kids playing soccer, you would think the US would be a force at international soccer. Also, their athletes in other team sports like Basketball aren’t really taking away from the soccer talent pool, as guys like LeBron James could never be pro soccer players (too tall). (Likewise Messi could never be a NBA or NFL player)
Why isnt the US world class at men‘s soccer?
Comments
It just isn’t that popular here. Simple as.
You’re an athletic young man in France: You go play soccer. Other sports barely cross your mind.
You’re an athletic young man in the US: You go play football, basketball, and baseball. Maybe soccer, but probably not.
Soccer is usually (but not universally) seen as a women’s sport.
Lack of interest mostly.
Enough people get swayed away from soccer that the talent pool hasn’t really had time to develop.
Americans by and large simply don’t care enough about soccer to bother watching it at the professional level, it’s simple as that.
Our best athletes play football (Americans football) and basketball for the most part. Just how it is in the US
Our women’s team has it covered
Soccer isn’t a popular sport, especially compared to football. as such it doesn’t pay as well at the professional level (in the MLS) – plain and simple.
What makes great soccer players valuable (their speed, agility, field vision) is also what makes position players in sports like football valuable.
Average salary for an NFL wide receiver; $23m/year
Average salary for a striker in the MLS: $600k/year.
Little kids want to grow up to play in the NFL because that’s what they watch on TV at home, as adults from a financial standpoint it makes more sense for them to want to pursue a career in a higher paying field (pardon the pun).
Our best athletes have better options than soccer.
Pay-to-play and competition with more popular sports.
Because soccer here is widely viewed as a kids’ sport.
We don’t care about soccer.
American football is the similar sport that draws the athletes.
Youth soccer, especially at higher skill levels is expensive, so that cuts out a lot of the pool. There’s no system like European countries where clubs are subsidized by pro teams.
As others said, it just isn’t popular here. When I was a kid and my friends wanted to play sports, it was either football (American) or basketball, sometimes baseball, never soccer though. There has been an increase in soccer in Spanish neighborhoods like my own, but the majority just don’t care for it that much. I’ve tried to watch it and it’s just too boring (my own opinion)
Its because soccer is a cheap and easy sport to organize and play with younger children. Most will turn to different sports or fall out of sports entirely once they are given different opportunities.
Having a larger population helps, but it is counteracted by the fact that a much smaller fraction of said population watches American soccer, which pulls funding, and even less play it and a competitive level that diminishes the skill pool.
The best athletes go into other sports here. The US still does fairly well internationally, though
It’s the most played sport up to a certain age, where a lot of kids go into other sports. We just don’t have the same developing infrastructure and pathways as a lot of other countries. I think that’s changing, but we got a lot of ground to make up
Even if the NBA talent would probably have never been soccer stars, millions of tallish kids who grow to be 6ft and would have been prototypical soccer stars played basketball instead. Millions of kids lifted weights and trained to play football instead of running more and playing soccer
While soccer is a popular sport to play as kids it has never translated to higher interest in the sport as adults. A majority of our athletes gravitate to Football, basketball, Baseball, and Hockey instead of staying soccer.
It’s big for kids maybe aged 3-10 or so, then they go into other sports like baseball, basketball, football, or nothing at all.
Because the US has many other sports which have far better developmental networks built and are far more popular and lucrative at the professional level.
There’s really a huge difference between kids level soccer and the type of culture and infrastructure needed to produce top quality professional players and coaches like other countries year in and year out
Most Americans who are mega talentented want to be rich and famous here, not anywhere else.
It hasn’t had as much opportunity to develop as it has in parts of LatAm and Europe.
We’re getting better and can even compete with teams in the rest of the Americas now, somewhat.
But it takes time
We also don’t have the training infrastructure for it. Yeah it might be a popular sport in high school or even college, with some exceptional talents, but their career ends there because we don’t have the training camps, the leagues, and other development programs to continue developing their talents. We could, but the interest isn’t high enough for us to invest in. Of our exceptional soccer players, the serious ones leave the country to join teams or training programs abroad.
“In America, people fucking hate soccer, and honestly that’s the way it should be”- Kenny Powers
Our most athletic kids are funneled toward different sports like American football or basketball.
We also don’t have the developmental infrastructure to produce the talent that European academy teams do.
all these answers on here are bullshit or at best only half correct. the real reason does have to do with popularity, but not in the way people are framing it.
it’s not because soccer “isn’t popular” at all in the US. people on here like to act like soccer is some unknown sport that everyone hates in the US. it’s not, a lot of people like it and play it. i’m from new york and though people do like basketball and football more, soccer is still up there. it’s been an available sport since the 50s in many high schools.
it’s very popular in sheer numbers. about 500,000 high school boys play soccer. that’s about as many as basketball and baseball, and over 10 TIMES as many high school hockey players.
without even checking, i can guarantee you that’s many more players than countries that are great at soccer like croatia, uruguay, the netherlands, belgium, portugal etc.
it doesn’t have to do with the stupid “ThE GoOd AmEricAn AthLetes PlAy bAskEtbalL aNd FoOtball” trope either.
ah yes, messi, the greatest soccer player ever, is certainly famous for his blisteringly fast 40 yard dash, his explosive strength, his crazy vertical, and his huge stature. it doesn’t work like that in soccer. this isn’t american football.
the actual answer is that due to other sports being more popular in the public eye, the US hasn’t developed a rich soccer culture. in all the aforementioned countries, soccer is really the only popular sport. people grow up with a ball attached to their foot.
this makes them better, but even moreso, it forces great soccer “infrastructure” to develop. high level coaching, good teams, good facilities etc are all easily accessible to the everyone there. in the US, not so much. they have development farrr beyond us.
TLDR: tons of people play and like soccer in the US but due to it being the 4th most popular sport we never developed the proper infrastructure to truly develop great players, so most of the soccer played in the US is very low level in comparison with the countries that excel at it.
edit: one thing i forgot to mention. it’s a very “generationally american” thing to outwardly proclaim your dislike soccer, especially amongst older (millenial+) white people. (that’s why all the answers you’re receiving are the way they are) some weird masculine posturing comes into play with the whole thing as well. african americans are generally very far removed from soccer, so much that they don’t even think about it at all.
amongst basically all immigrants/those with recent immigrant ancestry (especially latinos) soccer is one of the most popular sports.
Soccer is mostly a kids sport here. Children play it when they are young but as they get older they start to focus on other sports, namely of Baseball, Football, Basketball and, Hockey. Although Hockey tends to be geographically limited, everyone I knew grew up playing Hockey, but I am in Michigan. I doubt someone growing up in Alabama has the same experience.
It is so boring. It’s hours long and few goals are scored. But to answer your question, it is mostly thought of as a way to get exercise for kids. My son was in it. I didn’t take it seriously.
Because of this.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sports_cheat_sheet.png
Many reasons:
So MLS has to compete with 4 other major sports leagues, which all cover specific times of the calender year (NFL early fall – winter, NBA Late fall – Spring, MLB spring – Fall, and NHL which goes from Fall to June)
Soccer leagues in other countries didn’t or don’t have all this league competition, they usually are the top leagues in their respective country.
NASL was founded in the 50s/60 and for a while had some traction, however its major downfall was bringing in too many popular european players at a high salary while league attendances and ticket sales were down, since americans found the sport boring.
MLS is a really young league, founded in the 90s, it has grown financially and in popularity but it still needs a long way to go if it ever wants to surpass the big 3 (mlb, nfl and nba), some numbers say that it has surpassed NHL, others say it still needs time to surpass NHL, however hosting the 2026 world cup will be a good thing for the MLS and will allow soccer to expand more in the US.
Culture: Americans like supporting sports from their respective Country and continent, and want to promote things they created or help found, Soccer is not one of those supports and is seen as a foreigner sport, while American Football and baseball are both American sports and Hockey seen as a canadian (But us and canada are close to each other in a lot of ways) and as im looking it up it seems basketball has origins in both canada and the US.
Also 3 out of the 4 big sports in america are either highly contact sports (football and hockey) or high scoring (basketball) which americans find more entertaining rather than the more patient and chilled out style of soccer (association football). even american leagues/associations promote this, NBA highly favours offense in their rules so that it is easier to score and harder to defend legally, American leagues are better at marketting and making rivalries or “drama” rather than european ones.
okay i wrote for wayyy to long, heres a TLDR:
Soccer developed later than the other sports, americans mostly find it boring, so are uninterested in it.
fun fact: at one point, there was 2 soccer leagues that were competiting as professional rivals, which caused confussion amongst fans and it lead to both leagues declining in viewership.
Our best athletes are playing other sports. Why isn’t the rest of the world better at American football? The answer might shock you.
Soccer is mostly a children’s game in the US.
In addition to what everyone else has said, youth soccer at the top levels is super expensive and requires specialization at a younger age than the three main sports. The same thing is happening with baseball which is why you’re seeing the percentage of American born players in the MLB go down in recent years
I don’t buy the reason that all of the best athletes play other sports. Iceland has a population smaller than Omaha, and it is able to make it to the World Cup. There should be more than enough athletes in America who stick with soccer to be competitive.
The main reason is that the player development system in this country is just bad. Most kids start playing on a team coached by some kid’s dad who probably knows next to nothing about soccer. In most of the country you can’t get serious coaching unless you go to some expensive for-profit soccer academy. One of the best soccer players in US history, Clint Dempsey, almost had to quit soccer as a teen because his family couldn’t afford it. MLS does have some free soccer academies now, but that’s just a small slice of the system. Other countries have player development down to a science. If they start doing badly in international competitions their governing bodies are able to examine and overhaul their player development systems from top to bottom. Player development in the US is an ad hoc mess and the USSF probably couldn’t fix it even if they wanted to.
The US isn’t good because there is poor youth development. Soccer is pay to play so the better players end up on travel teams playing other good teams in games and not drilling enough to develop skill.
The traditional US player is more athletic than skilled. They lack the coaching and the reps to truly get skilled. The fact that it’s mostly just games and wins and losses are valued more than player development. The fast strong kids rely on speed and power as opposed to skill and precision. At the highest level everyone is fast and strong to a degree and what separates the world class players from the really good players is those things that US players don’t develop.
That said there has been some changes to US soccer and MLS academies have been incentivized to develop their own players. The US will always lose players to the more popular sports but they are doing better to develop the ones that already choose soccer.
I also think that the OP is under estimating the current level of the USMNT. This is currently the most talented generation of players plying their trade at clubs that would not have been seen as realistic 20 years ago for outfield players. (Milan, Juventus) the US is a top 15 or so team right now. It would not be shocking to see the team make the quarter finals of the next World Cup.
You also have to realize that the US didn’t even have a proper professional league until 1996. If you are a 30 year old player there was not a league to play in the US when you were born. Messi was playing in his local club teams youth academy before the MLS played their first game. It’s not realistic to expect results at this point in US soccer. Relative to where the rest of the world has been for decades
As other people have mentioned, men’s soccer is the fourth or fifth favorite sport. So, kids who are athletic are more likely to gravitate towards American football, baseball, basketball (if they are over six feet tall), and hockey. And while basketball players are generally too tall to play soccer, most American football players are not. Ronaldo is 6’2″ and 185, which would be the ideal height and weight for a WR/DB. Messi is a bit short to play American football, but would likely have found success playing baseball. And all of this, of course, is based on what sports the kid and the kid’s family watches growing up. Soccer games on TV have only recently been a thing in the US.
In contrast, women’s soccer is absolutely a thing in the US. And so girls and young women who want to pursue a career in athletics will look to soccer as a way to play professionally.
We make it into the world cup, basically every time. That puts us pretty high globally.
Our best athletes play baseball, basketball, football, and hockey and baseball. We Americans don’t really care much about the sport. If our best athletes grew up playing soccer like the rest of the world we would be top contenders every cycle
Besides the point that soccer is behind a lot of other sports in popularity, it’s also a major pay to play sport here. A lot of sports are but it being the 5th most popular team sport here at best isn’t really going to get people lining up to pay for it.
We don’t have the player development system that exists in other countries. That’s the problem. Millions of kids can play recreational youth soccer and very few of them will become professional-caliber players because there isn’t a system to get them there.
Player development at the youth level in the United States relies almost entirely on parents paying thousands of dollars a year for club dues, coaching, clinics, etc. and taking on basically a second job as “soccer parent” for 10 years or more. If this works out, the kid goes to college on scholarship. That is the expected goal. For most players it will be the first and only time soccer actually pays for itself. Though it’s a weird system where the player also has to be a student, when it might make sense for the player to just play.
In the great soccer countries, youth soccer is better integrated with the pipeline to professional play. Notably, the academies for developing top players are free of charge.
We do have the same “pay to play” system in other sports, where parents pay to develop players in hopes of scholarship. I think it’s actually not working there, either. In particular, look at how overrepresented other countries’ players are in “American” sports. E.g., the fact something like a quarter of MLB players are international suggests the Dominican Republican and Venezuela, in particular, are just better at developing baseball players than the Untied States is.
Because most young kids in the States play all sports.
But the best of the best athletes in the USA (generally and by the numbers) gravitate toward American football, baseball, and basketball as they get older.
These big 3 sports are the ones that get the most money and media attention in the U.S. After these three, golf, hockey, and tennis also probably get more attention than soccer.
In a plurality of countries around the world, soccer/football is THE sport for most of the best athletes by the numbers.
Soccer does seem to be growing in popularity in the States though. But hoops and baseball and American football have dominant positions in our nation’s psyche.
Soccer doesn’t gain traction on American TV because there are no frequent breaks for commercials like there are in popular American sports. You have to really seek out televised soccer in the US. Baseball, football, and basketball are ubiquitous.
I mean, there’s plenty of sports that are popular in schools that don’t have followings among adults.
Wrestling (real wrestling, not scripted WWE wrestling), volleyball, swimming, and running are also popular school sports. Yet I don’t hear much from those outside of The Olympics. It’s just the same for soccer; sports people play in school doesn’t necessarily translate to what sports they’ll care about as adults.
And most school athletes who believe they have what it takes to go pro, are just gonna go play football, basketball, baseball, maybe even hockey.
Like others have said American boys are just more interested in other sports here. Basketball and American football are much more popular so the top talent goes to those sports. I think if those sports weren’t as popular American men would have a similar amount of success in soccer that American Women have had at the World Cup.
Culture mostly
The first professional soccer league in England was founded in 1888
Professional baseball started in 1876, professional American football started in the 1892, professional basketball 1898
The first professional US soccer league was started in 1921 and it failed during the Great Depression while the other sports leagues remained popular.
Soccer just doesn’t have the strong roots in American culture that our other major sports have
Our best athletes end up playing real sports.
Soccer is considered a gateway sport here. Like, you do that first, then do something else. It’s also a little gated off. You need to have money to play for a travel team.
Also, as several other people have mentioned, there are professional sports that pay better. But, this is a team that reached the World Cup quarterfinals 20 years ago. They have competed. We’ll let other places have this one.
It would help if our pro league didn’t cap salaries and played when every other real league does.
Because many of the most athletic players are steered toward the NFL or NBA.
Suburban players in places like CA are often playing baseball with private lessons with former MLB or DI players and coaches with the hope of getting college scholarships.
In places like Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan a lot of players gravitate to hockey as the main sport.
Grass roots….football culture…sense of belonging to the your home town team…
Passion and ambition of climbing a league structure through the glory of promotion and the agony of relegation.
Not sure the NFL / NBA franchise model works for football in the US in same way as the leagues in the UK, Europe and other ‘traditional’ footballing nations.
What sports in the US can most likely make you a millionaire if you have any talent? Not soccer.
Soccer has a remarkably low price of entry when compared to other sports that are popular here, so almost every kid plays it for a while when they’re younger, but there are several other sports with larger followings here that if kids stay in sport they may branch out into. The big four are football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. Each with a higher price of entry, but also much more clout surrounding success in those sports.
As long as a single baseball player can sign a contract worth more than the annual payroll of every professional soccer team combined, youth soccer is going to be much less competitive. We all play badminton in school as well but school sports are not designed to produce world class atheletes
Soccer isn’t really that popular here
Our top athletes gravitate to other sports.
If Messi grows up in America with his talents, he could easily be a high-end slot receiver in football. Could play any position in baseball, as we have tons of shorter guys who play baseball. Not sure if his talent translates to those sports though. Generally guys as guys as him are great at everything they play.
As others have said, soccer is like our 4th or 5th most popular sport. Kids play it a lot when they’re young because we don’t really let kids play much football, baseball, or hockey that young. Some will, but a lot of kids won’t start those sports until they’re 10-12. Kids will start soccer at like 5.
>Why isnt the US world class at men‘s soccer?
It’s just not popular here.
I assume the reason so many kids might play it is because it’s a cheap sport to get into.
At the adult level you’re almost never gonna have people watch soccer over football, baseball, basketball, hockey, or hell even golf. Americans can barely be bothered to watch the world cup.
Anyway, the reason we’re not world class at soccer is the same reason Germany or Brazil isn’t world class at baseball.
Other sports like Baseball, Football and Basketball are higher prestige and higher paid. Top young athletes therefore gravitate towards them, even if they also play Soccer.
Our top league plays at a weird time compared to global tradition. It shows an unwillingness to compete globally which would raise the profile of the sport in America.
Its damned expensive to have a kid in a good development league.
because it kind of bores us, so we do not take it very seriously
I think it has to do with our better athletes playing other sports first but you can’t remove the fact that cultural it just isn’t as big of a deal like it is in the rest of the world. It’s just not in our blood like other countries
Soccer is mostly a recreational sport in the US.
There isn’t a professional market for it comparable to gridiron football, basketball, baseball and hockey (and that’s pretty much the pro sports pecking-order), which means there isn’t much interest in the college teams, and so on down.
America’s best athletes play American football or baseball or basketball, not soccer.
Sports in the US have become part of the college admissions industrial complex. Really good soccer players in the US go to academies at like age 14. And American universities don’t have great soccer programs. So if you’re not good enough to go pro, you switch sports to improve your chances of an athletic scholarship
Every (or nearly) kid in the US plays soccer….when they are like 6. Parents get a break and it tires out the kids. Its affordable and accessible. So its the sport with the highest youth participation rate, sure. But its not in our big 3: Football, Basketball, and Baseball. Those sports get greater attention, admiration, emphasis, and are cultural staples. Hockey is more popular than soccer. Nascar is more popular. Soccer just isn’t really a thing on the mens side. Our best male athletes will more often prioritize one of the other sports and this leads to a reduction in the talent pool and level of competition.
I do not feel embarrassed at all that our mens team is so awful on the world stage. I don’t really think about it at all to be honest….other than the fact that the guys on the team probably could have made great slot receivers, kickers/punters, or runningbacks. But if they are happy then it can’t and shouldn’t be considered a waste of talent. Soccer is not our game, it never will be. If you are an American who enjoys it then that all the more power to you, but its just not part of our sports culture and I don’t think it needs to be either.
Ignore the username….I was like 12 and way to proud of my heritage and wish Reddit would let you change your name without deleting your account.
We don’t have good academics for soccer development and the ones we have are all pay to play. This severely limits our talent pool for our national team and is why you don’t see many American footballers find success abroad.
The goal of the U.S. national development program is to identify kids that might qualify for a D1 soccer scholarship and put them on that track. It’s not to identify elite athletes and turn them into world class soccer players (and the best athletes in the U.S. gravitate toward more lucrative sports)
Soccer isn’t the #1 sport here in the states. Not even top 3. NOT EVEN TOP 5. wish it was more popular tho
The US doesn’t have another professional teams with academies to develop young talent. It’s gotten a lot better at it in the last 20 years though and with demographic changes I expect the trajectory of the growth of US professional football to continue. They need a proper pyramid to progress imo
Young men have more options. They could do football, basketball, baseball, hockey, or any other number of smaller sports.
Women’s soccer does better because it’s more of the sport to play for little girls. Football isn’t often an option for them, same with baseball (they usually do softball instead but there’s no real pro avenue with that). Field hockey and running is popular. Running usually has the opposite season of soccer so many girls do both.
Seems like youth participation in soccer isn’t strongly correlated with national popularity in some western countries
Its the same in Australia, soccer has huge junior participation but has a fair bit of competition to claim 4th spot for our nationally popular sports
I think soccer being a low impact, easy to pick up game makes it an easy choice for a lot of concerned parents. But these kids still watch football/basketball/whatever on the weekends, and probably want to play those sports as they grow up
It’s a combination of lack of public interest and more competition from other sports.
No other large country has so many other huge, lucrative sports leagues like the U.S. does. So yes, we have big advantages in population and athletic infrastructure compared to many other countries that are successful in soccer. But our athletes get pulled into other sports, eyeballs are drawn to other sports’ TV shows, and our money is spent on other games.
The good news is that the Americans who love pro soccer tend to REALLY love pro soccer. But it’s just so hard to compete. Ask Americans where to find MLS games on TV and only a small percentage of them could tell you. There’s just only so much time, bandwidth, and money to go around for sports and other sports already occupy most of it.
I think a big part of it is age based too. In US sport, the driving force is a scholarship and education before going pro; the average age of an NFL rookie is 21.8,while the average age of a pro-soccer player is 18.5. Couple this with a lack of exposure (a friend of mine who played in Europe and now works as a talent scout for our local MLS team Saya that “If you’re not on the radar by 12, you’ve got better odds of winning the lottery twice than getting a look”) and a lack of quality coaching at youth levels stacks the odds against US kids.
Football, basketball, baseball, and hockey all generate far far more revenue compared to soccer in the US. In fact the NHL generated 3x the revenue of MLS. It is not taken seriously most of the time by the majority of the population. If the US national teams do well then you can see more and more people taking the game seriously.
Maybe because there are many other countries where football/soccer is a religion that athletic young boys all want to get into and get scouted for, etc. Soccer is not “cool” like that in the US.
Also if you are a world class kicker you are probably going to play American football instead. (maybe professional kickball?) Same thing if you are extremely good at running in zigzags while being chased.
Like others have said, school sports is what 99% of pro athletes in the US do to get to that level, for a lot of boys sports (high school and lower) the most popular sports (from what I’ve seen) are football (American football), Basketball, and Baseball. These also happen to be the largest, most prestigious, and most profitable professional sports in the US. This leads the general population to gravitate more towards those sports, which means more money invested, which means more viewers, and bigger paychecks.
These sports are also very well suited to commercial breaks due to how the sports are played. At some point in the game, there will be a stop in play, and there’s plenty of 15+ minute breaks in them as well. Soccer on the other hand doesn’t stop play unless there’s an injury, a penalty, or its halftime, which means less clear chances for commercial breaks during the game, which leads to advertisers not wanting to buy ad slots or having to fight over ad slots during games, and the viewership of an average MLS game is probably way lower than MLB,NBA, NFL, and probably NHL games, so the value of spending advertising money on MLS is lower.
This means the MLS/ teams in the MLS don’t make as much, which drives wages down, which means that MLS teams may or may not have the budget (either because if business reasons or league rules (like a salary cap) to pay more than the other sports leagues/ teams. So these players choose to play the most popular (and profitable) sports instead of playing soccer professionally.
Edit: we can also look at the minimum rookie salaries across the major leagues in the US to see why an athlete good enough to play professionally wouldn’t choose soccer.
MLB: $760,000
MLS: $104,000
NBA: $1,157,153
NFL: $840,000
NHL: $750,000
Our best athletes play other sports
We don’t care about men’s soccer as much as we care about football, baseball, basketball, hell even hockey. The average european probably knows more about MLS than the average American does tbh.
where i grew up soccer was much more common amongst us girls. all the boys were pressured to play football or baseball
It would be interesting to see the ranking. It doesn’t surprise me that soccer is played by more kids than baseball, because generally boys play baseball and girls play softball. If you combined those two very similar sports I would guess that number would be more than those that play soccer. My small town doesn’t have any soccer at any level, but plenty of baseball and softball.
Because our best young athletes aspire to star in other sports
There’s no way it’s the most played, no way. If by “play” they mean, “had at least one day in P.E. where they played it”, then maybe.
Also you said “kids”, well soccer can have boys and girls easier than any other popular sport.
To answer your question: soccer culture is small and niche. Football, basketball, and baseball dominate. Even hockey is well ahead of soccer
Cause we don’t really care about soccer in general.
The US is perfectly fine at soccer. Top 15 worldwide and has been higher. No one is owed a top place regularly just by being sporting and a large population. The lack of league structure or professional teams probably hampers it more than what people are suggesting about the best players going to other sports.
The US governing body is just bad. We constantly rewarded bad coaches and executives who don’t actually make the team better. Coaches at the top level still bring their kids into the top US team…we don’t reward exceptionalism like we do in other sports, and continually make the worst coaching and talent choices