I spend several months each year out of the US in Europe or in Mexico. One of the things I do is go to football matches (at all levels) and one of my favorite conversational topics with the locals is football. The average Mexican is as familiar with the EPL, the Bundesliga and La Liga as sports fans in Boston are with the American League East.
When you understand how the development of talent works it's not hard to see the huge hill the US has to climb to develop world class players. Millions of kids in Europe, Central and South America, Africa, Korea and Japan and Europe are busy playing football exclusively on the playgrounds, in dirt streets, and everywhere else.
From this a few exceptional players are produced like a Luis Suarez from Uruguay or a Christian Ronaldo from Portugal.
When I watch these games, I think I understand why the game will be such a hard sell in the US. Part of this is the imprecision of it like the calling of fouls or the almost arbitrary assignment of extra minutes at the end of the two halves.
And then there's the American need to have a winner. If NFL games regularly and routinely ended in 0-0 scores, there would be a lot fewer fans.
The bad news is, IMO, that --- much to the shock of US fans --- the rest of the world will never modify the game to suit US tastes in order to grow it's popularity here. Nor will they give the US another World Cup no matter how many FIFA executives we prosecute.
The US has competed relatively well in the World Cup, but they have been able to do this based on scheme and teamwork using European coaches, not the individual brilliance of players.
