Soccer was regarded as a somewhat newfangled sport when I was an adolescent and teenager in the first half of the 1980s. If you were a soccer fan, people might have suspected that you were going out of your way to be different or “special”.
I once asked my uncle if he ever watched soccer. “Well,” he said wryly, “soccer might be all right if you were a European.”
I fully grasped my uncle’s sentiment, even if I didn’t entirely agree with it. In that time and place, there were only three sports that counted: football, basketball, and baseball.
I ran track and cross country in high school. While no one regarded the running sports as aberrant, no one cared much about them, either. I don’t remember many spectators at our track meets—even when our team was doing well.
My high school got its first boys’ soccer team while I was a student there. The team did quite well, as I recall, winning a state championship in 1984. This was appreciated, of course; but the soccer team still played second fiddle to the football team in the fall athletic season. No one saw this as a great injustice or irony. It was just the way things were.
Soccer has become far more popular in the four decades since then. But it has become popular primarily as a sport that Americans play—not watch. And most of the Americans who play soccer are of student age.
Consider the numbers. The Super Bowl routinely pulls in 123 million to 128 million domestic viewers in the US. Even a World Cup final match struggles to pull in half that… in the US, that is. Globally, about 1.5 to 1.8 billion people follow the World Cup. American football, by contrast, has almost no bounce beyond US borders.
I have never been much into watching other people play sports. (Another thing about the US: our passion for spectator sports has risen in proportion to our obesity rates. But that’s another essay.) My personal disinterest, coupled with my indifference to soccer as an American, prejudiced me against watching the 2026 World Cup. I wasn’t against it; I just didn’t care.
And then I started watching—just to see what all the fuss was about, at first. Somewhat against my will, I got hooked. By the final match between Spain and Argentina, I was a moderately enthusiastic World Cup fan.
I discovered that there are some things about soccer that I particularly like. For one thing, it is one of the few remaining sports that a normal-sized person can play at a professional level. Pro basketball is now a game for people who are almost seven feet tall. I’m only 5’10”. I simply can’t relate to pro basketball. But the average World Cup soccer player is very close to my height.
Soccer is a fast-moving game. This is a quality that it shares with hockey. One cannot watch a soccer game with half one’s attention. One must either focus on the game, or focus on something else. The action is simply that engrossing.
I know that some Europeans can become rabid partisans of one team or another. Riots at European soccer venues have been a well-documented phenomenon for years.
I’ll probably never attend a match in person and I’d certainly never riot over the outcome of such a contest. But by the end of the 2026 World Cup, I was enthusiastically rooting for Spain. There were too many instances of poor sportsmanship on the Argentinian side, while the Spanish team struck me as a class act.
Soccer will probably never be as popular in the USA as pro football. The NFL is simply too entrenched in the American psyche. But pro soccer now has at least one new American fan. I’ll almost certainly watch the World Cup in 2030, and probably some additional tournaments in the interim.
-ET