But while attendances soar and TV ratings for matches show increased interest on par with the NBA Finals and the World Series of baseball, it’s not yet clear how long it will last. For some analysts, it remains to be seen whether or not this will be a breakthrough moment.
“It’s gone from around the fringes to being mainstream in the sense that there is a strong minority group of people that love it – that’s the biggest difference,” said Jeff Schneider, executive director of the Center for Sports, Entertainment, Media & Technology Law at the University of Southern California (USC).
Schneider argued that football – which is regarded as a “foreign import” by many Americans – is never going to be in the zeitgeist like American football or basketball. Those sports have longer-established history in the states and came of age at a time when media was not as pervasive “and when people spent their leisure time doing things, not passively consuming things”.
But he conceded that there was a firmly established foothold of loyal fans who both watch and play the sport – and that number has been increasing.
That’s mostly down to youth sports.
“Soccer has picked up where [American] football as a youth sport has declined,” said Steve Bank, an expert in sports law at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. “In [American] football, people worry about concussions, and that kind of thing has made it more problematic over the years.”
If the national team progress further, then the chances of the sport making strides in the US will increase. Belgium stand in the way on Monday evening and the scrutiny on the team’s performance has only increased in the wake of the controversial rescinding of striker Folarin Balogun’s red card, after a phone call between Trump and Infantino.
The seeds for growth were sown 30 years ago when a professional league called Major League Soccer (MLS) was launched as part of the deal to which the US signed up when hosting the 1994 World Cup. The MLS now has 30 teams across the US and Canada and features the world’s biggest star, Lionel Messi.
But the biggest audience draws are the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga, which have contributed to a sharp rise in spending on football media rights, according to research by Ampere Analysis., external
This growth has made the US the biggest foreign market for the four largest European leagues.
A recent Ampere survey of of sports fans found that football has narrowly unseated baseball as the number three sport in the US, with 10% of Americans saying it’s their favourite.
