Dear american football...

[KaiserUEO]

personally i think the NBA will take a hit and not the NFL.

soccer could use some taller guys who can run.

ill let Jimmy the Greek explain the rest...

 

[ImperialOrange]

It really is a regional thing. Living in Texas, it's obviously mainly football, but I'd say it's a pretty even split between soccer and baseball, at least around me. Obviously, that's thanks in very large part to the Hispanic population down here.

That's the thing with a lot of sports re: being regional. Soccer isn't the top sport in any market but it's top 4 in almost all of them. Youth Football is king in warm weather areas but loses a lot as you go north. Same thing that happens with hockey in the north vs hockey in Texas. Basketball is king in a lot of major cities but not as much as you get into the boondocks, etc. Soccer kind of happens everywhere with everyone.

 

[Millhouse]

My first hand experience is just the opposite. Soccer, and to a lesser extent lacrosse, is growing like wild fire. Youth football and little league baseball are taking hits. Organizations in those sports are either merging or seeing big reductions in participants and teams. While soccer has seen a large growth in participants, teams and new organizations. What has taken a hit is what I will call youth recreational soccer. Everyone is moving to the club teams and organizations. There is now even a program, which too is hugely popular, calked Little Kickers. The age group is 2-5. Yes, 2 year olds. This growth all started a few years ago so has nothing to do with the WC.

We've also seen cuts in some HS's at the freshman and modified team levels but it is all about budget cuts and not interest.

i started my son at 2 with soccer. they call the ball Bob. and then they kick bob in the face over and over. whatever. three year olds are crackheads. in the fall we'll watch marrone punt bob in the face from the 29 yard line and hate life. i'll turn the channel when someone breaks their neck. on monday i'll feel bad for watching football. on sunday we'll do it again.

 

[jekelish]

I agree that soccer is gaining in popularity but I think you just showed why it is not close to hoops in the U.S. yet. As you stated, college hoops= big business. If you look at the big basketball picture in the US, it includes NBA + college. No matter how you slice it, U.S. soccer is dwarfed by it.

And I'm not trying to suggest that soccer is as popular as basketball, by the way. Far from it. Basketball is my favorite sport and that will never change, after all. But I'm pointing to MLS attendance simply to illustrate that it's indisputable that the league is gaining in popularity as is soccer as a whole in the US.

 

[Scooch]

I'll just, once again, make the point that participation in youth sports is not correlated to their corresponding professional league's attendance or TV ratings.

 

[Millhouse]

I'll just, once again, make the point that participation in youth sports is not correlated to their corresponding professional league's attendance or TV ratings.

pro dodgeball and kickball are bound to explode in popularity, wave of the future

 

[jekelish]

pro dodgeball and kickball are bound to explode in popularity, wave of the future

Dodgeball promotes bullying, man. Its day is done. Didn't you know?

 

[007]

I'll just, once again, make the point that participation in youth sports is not correlated to their corresponding professional league's attendance or TV ratings.

If we could remove the steadfast belief by many that personal experience and subjective interpretations do not necessarily constitute data driven "facts," then this thread would have been 1 page long...

 

[rrlbees]

I'll just, once again, make the point that participation in youth sports is not correlated to their corresponding professional league's attendance or TV ratings.

I don't think so either. The NFL, NBA and MLB aren't going anyplace. But soccer is growing even if at a slow pace. So it will be years before it approaches MLB or the NHL. But the number of adult fans will increase as those kids get older. I also think some very very good athletes who might be a stud in football are now playing soccer. The rough thing with soccer at the HS level is that kids get cut and rosters are limited to 22-25 players. Most schools around here don't have football cuts. So their rosters might be 50-70 kids.

 

[TheCusian]

the popularity gap between olympic hockey and NHL hockey applies here. let's not go too crazy. i'm sure there are plenty of articles about the US hockey team in 2008 and how maybe that kickstarts the sport and it didn't

I'm not arguing that it "kick starts" the sport. I'm saying momentum already is building, along with demographics towards it passing baseball and hockey. It has been the story for a while - it just gets noticed more during the World Cup. (Also another area where Internet, Streaming, and Twitter have helped build momentum).

Not in response to you, but haven't seen this posted at all:

Hockey and Football are tough to pick up if:

- your parents don't like violence
- your parents don't want to buy tons of gear

They same goes to cash strapped school districts. Soccer is a relatively cheap sport to maintain.

 

[Scooch]

If we could remove the steadfast belief by many that personal experience and subjective interpretations do not necessarily constitute data driven "facts," then this thread would have been 1 page long...

I DON'T LIKE THE NBA AND NEVER WATCH IT. I SPEAK FOR EVERYONE.

:bat:

 

[IthacaMatt]

one problem with soccer is that the talent is too spread out over the world
MLS is going to be minor league sport played in big markets. you can watch and enjoy it but you can't get that invested in something when you know it's inferior

That's like saying people won't watch, or become invested in, mid-major hoops programs, because your team isn't going to compete for a championship. Not the case.

 

[TheCusian]

one problem with soccer is that the talent is too spread out over the world people complain about parity in US sports, these other leagues are a joke. the nba, mlb, and nhl get the all the best players concentrated here. soccer has all the best players spread all over the world and none of them are here. balotelli in italy, zlatan in paris, messi and ronaldo are in spain together but that's one of the most top heavy leagues, robben and all those german robots in the german league. maybe we're selfish but we already have sports where the cream of the crop come here where we can see them live. with soccer, you have to work so hard to see all the best in their club leagues and most of the time they're playing some worthless team of scrubs. the champions league is great but that still excludes some great players MLS is going to be minor league sport played in big markets. you can watch and enjoy it but you can't get that invested in something when you know it's inferior MLS's attendance is surprisingly high compared to the other soccer leagues. we b!tch about SU football attendance and it's better than most soccer leagues avg (I know there are many more games)

This is spot on. We like to watch the best. If World Cup was every year - soccer would be massive. Instead the best is overseas, and hard to watch.

 

[Upstate]

One factor that most people are forgetting is that we have an aging population. They're not really soccer fans. Their children are and their children's children are. Go to a USA game, it's 75% 35 and younger. That's the generation that's going to breed more soccer fans. It's a young(er) person's sport right now because you couldn't watch the EPL or the Champion's League 30 years ago on TV. Now, it's readily available. And being embraced by a younger generation. It's awesome to see.

 

[IthacaMatt]

I think part of that is driven by the change in parenting styles. When I was a kid my friends and I were all able to go the park on our own and play baseball. In today's world with kids staying closer to home and less free run baseball has suffered because of it.

Another thing working against baseball is that it takes a lot of kids to play a sandlot game (which I used to do as a young kid), and kids are not all outside after school with nothing to do these days. Times have changed. Apart from hoops, kids generally don't play sports at all unless it's an organized activity.

 

[rrlbees]

i started my son at 2 with soccer. they call the ball Bob. and then they kick bob in the face over and over. whatever. three year olds are crackheads. in the fall we'll watch marrone punt bob in the face from the 29 yard line and hate life. i'll turn the channel when someone breaks their neck. on monday i'll feel bad for watching football. on sunday we'll do it again.

I'm not sure I know what that all says but I'm gonna guess it says that your kid started soccer young but you still watch football.

 

[IthacaMatt]

I'll just, once again, make the point that participation in youth sports is not correlated to their corresponding professional league's attendance or TV ratings.

That's ignoring demographic and taste trends. It used to be, just 10 years ago, that even the TV announcers were not that familiar with the rules of the sport. Pretty much everyone has had kids play soccer by now, and pretty much everyone understands things like the offsides rule, which wasn't the case not that long ago. Soccer's "otherness" is pretty much gone. And in fact, MLS ratings are doing reasonably well. I expect a pretty big spike after the World Cup, as these players mostly come home to MLS teams, instead of going off to Europe.

 

[Millhouse]

That's like saying people won't watch, or become invested in, mid-major hoops programs, because your team isn't going to compete for a championship. Not the case.

mid major conferences aren't as popular as major conferences. we just spent 10 years worrying that we we were going to end up a mid major.

MLS is a mid major. it's ok, watchable, has fans. but mid majors are popular with people who went to those schools. there's nothing that's going to attach people to an MLS team like that.

 

[jekelish]

One other thing to illustrate how rapidly MLS has grown, it's ranked as the 7th best pro league in the world: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/...gence.html?pg=all&ref=https://www.google.com/

Not bad for a league that has only existed for 20 years, and which, frankly, I thought would fail.

 

[Millhouse]

One other thing to illustrate how rapidly MLS has grown, it's ranked as the 7th best pro league in the world: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865578830/MLS-ranked-7th-best-soccer-league-in-the-world-by-Sporting-Intelligence.html?pg=all&ref=https://www.google.com/

Not bad for a league that has only existed for 20 years, and which, frankly, I thought would fail.

we have so many leagues that are the best in the world. people are going to watch those

 

[IthacaMatt]

I can't post specific numbers (sorry!) but NHL is about 25% higher than MLS for avid fans. Not as big as you might think given the history of each league. The NHL is not, and never has been, a "major" sport in the US. It's a huge niche sport, and is major in certain regions. There are 5 national, major, US leagues: NFL, MLB, NBA, CFB and CBB.

I wouldn't pit sports against each other the way people are in this thread, though. Interest in sports is not zero-sum, which is why polling about people's absolute favorite isn't entirely useful. There is opportunity for one to grow without necessarily causing another to decline.

I think MLS is closing the gap. I was just looking this up. NHL draws about 500K fans for regular season broadcasts. MLS is between 300-400K, but that's only English language, not counting Univision.

 

[IthacaMatt]

Complete and utter nonsense. Avg. attendance in less than half the games with tix costing a fraction of nba tix does not equal passing either sport. Not to mention the size of arenas vs stadiums. This is a disingenuous argument.

Well, the NBA waters down its product with so many meaningless regular season games. Their attendance is not growing and the viewership is not growing like soccer. That's like saying football attendance is artificially skewed by a shortage of the product. As exposure on TV grows, many sports experience lower viewership per broadcast. That's money to the owners, too - broadcast rights and the live gate and merchandise. You can't simply throw one out and say "oh, that doesn't matter because they don't play as many / they play more games."

 

[IthacaMatt]

what does that translate to roughly for league minimum salaries and average salary? Just a guestimate based on how the numbers work?

I'm thinking that teams will probably be allowed to add another designated player each, and I'm hoping salaries go up by around 20%. Just like if the NBA D-League paid better salaries, better players would find it more appealing to stay at home and build up the league.

 

[Millhouse]

I think MLS is closing the gap. I was just looking this up. NHL draws about 500K fans for regular season broadcasts. MLS is between 300-400K, but that's only English language, not counting Univision.

the NHL should've been embarrassed to have the Sabres on NBCSN so much last year. despite tanking on purpose and being the least entertaining team in the world, they were still better off having that idiot milbury troll depressed buffalo hockey nuts.

big difference between closing hockey thigh gap and closing any other gap.

 

[OrangePA]

Same deal - I went to the conference championship at RFK in 2006 or 2007; it was electric. It doesn't come across as well on television, but being there was awesome. A lot of hipsters, but still - great times.

I am a Philadelphia Union season ticket holder.

The soccer stadium is great.

The place sells out.

The game is fun to watch and lasts two hours - no need to spend the entire day at a sporting event.