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[QUOTE="IthacaMatt, post: 4718937, member: 405"]
Premier League television ratings are up 79% in the last 10 years.  Average viewership is just under 500k per game, whereas the average NCAA basketball regular season game draws about half of that.

The summer tours of the US outdraw the regular attendance for these teams at home in Europe.

MLS attendance is up 25-30% in the last couple years, and teams draw about 25,000 per game, which is better than the NBA.  Messi, of course, is going to explode that demand.

Apple just invested $2.5 [I]billion[/I] to broadcast MLS for the next 10 years.  NBC paid $2.7 billion for 6 years of the Premier League.

Last year's World Cup Final between Argentina and France drew more than 25 million viewers in the US. That's [U]more than double[/U] the viewership for last year's World Series.  It is also more people than watched the NCAA football championship game.

And although the viewership is still puny, in the US we can now also watch Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga and Ligue Un, although those numbers will undoubtedly rise, as more and more USMNT players play overseas.

The NFL and the Super Bowl are really the only sports events in the US that are still bigger than soccer.
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