7 ms·

Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

92 points by 7777777phil 4mo ago

RugnirViking 4mo ago
a country can only be so good at so many sports of this type. Every american playing basketball, or baseball, or american football, or ice hockey, is one not playing football. You have to understand that for many countries, the dream path, the default one, for a very athletic young person who is interested in team sports is soccer, from the age of 6 or younger. The entire structure above that branches outward based on this huge intake of talented children, with vast institutions of professional coaches, academies, and huge amounts of training and game time with other talented people, no matter where in the country they live. Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business. This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  I think the rest of the world is rapidly catching up whent it comes to girls.
- brewdad 4mo ago
  Also, in the US until very recently, there was no path for women athletes to make sports their career after college. Soccer could be a path to a scholarship but you were going to have to get a "real" job after that even if you wanted to continue to pursue Olympic or World Cup level goals in the sport. The NWSL is changing that but salaries are still nowhere near the men's game, nor any other male dominated professional league.
hackerbeat 4mo ago
Didn't read the post, but the problem is that in most top soccer countries, soccer is the number one sport, light-years ahead of everything else. In the US, several other sports are more popular, which drains the talent pool. Kids grow up immersed in soccer culture in places like Brazil, Argentina, Germany or Spain in a way that simply isn't as common in the US.
- cortesoft 4mo ago
  I get this argument, and it is probably partially right, but is soccer really competing for the same athletes as basketball and American football? Basketball players are mostly too tall for soccer (other than goalie), and a majority of football players are way bigger than great soccer players. Baseball and hockey might compete for the same athletes, but a huge percentage of baseball and hockey players also come from other countries.
  - bad_haircut72 4mo ago
    Kids who are good at sport excel at it all throughout school years, then once they hit college age the smaller ones dont make it further in American football any more - but they still spent their childhood playing it. In e.g. Uraguay its probably opposite, the naturally heavy guys cant compete at top level soccer (Im guessing) and fall out of professional sports
  - vasco 4mo ago
    For national teams you only need to consider outlier athletes not averages. And many of the most top athletes at sport A would do very well at sport B. If a country funnels 100% of kids into a single sport, every single genetically gifted athlete will be put through the same selection process. Imagine every single physically gifted kid going to tryouts of the same sport. That's Portugal.
  - cweld510 4mo ago
    It definitely is at the youth level. I don’t think any football or basketball pros could be soccer stars, but absolutely there are kids who are star point guards on their youth basketball team but top out at 5’8”, or football players who never make it past high school but could have been great at soccer.
waltfy 4mo ago
Not American. Don’t live in US. The outside impression I get is that the game simply isn’t one of the kids’ default street sports.
- fsckboy 4mo ago
  the US has a large relatively recent influx of Latino populations, and they play a lot of soccer, and in a number of cultures also baseball
  - waltfy 4mo ago
    Interesting, I didn’t think of that. Growing up in Brazil, soccer was essentially the only sport boys played, at every opportunity. In the absence of a ball, we’d dislodge the plastic ball from a roll on deodorant packaging and play with that, or a table football ball (which hurt a lot). Then - in my late teens - studying in the UK football (soccer) was also predominant, played during breaks etc. My point being that the US is along other large nations such as India, China which culturally favour other games/sports. Contrast these nations with Uruguay for example, tiny country… has won the World Cup. I do not know this, but I’d hazard a guess that soccer is THE game in the streets of Uruguay.
  - musictubes 4mo ago
    Yup. For many years in DC just about the only people that went to DC United games were Latinos. They are still the dominant supporters of professional US soccer I think. I had a surreal experience one day after work. I lived on a cul de sac and it was common to have kids play baseball or kickball in the summer. There was one Indian family on the street and the eldest boy had convinced them to try cricket that day. Heard him yelling “Bowl it! Bowl it!” So yeah, immigrants add a lot to the US including sports.
- jppope 4mo ago
  Correct. We actually don't play "football" properly as a street sport either though... its typically a flag style football (two hand touch, etc) but the main sports are (generally separated by season during school) football, hockey/basketball, baseball.
28304283409234 4mo ago
What are you talking about? They've been world champ repeatedly. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-history-womens-world-cup-spt-intl/ https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-histo...
- tekla 4mo ago
  The qualifier is literally the sub-headline and is mentioned several times in the article.
  - 28304283409234 4mo ago
    Yet it is not in the submission. How am I to know you all assume male sporting events?
talktalkmake 4mo ago
In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.
bananamogul 4mo ago
Because we have 4 other sports that originated in the Americas: basketball, gridiron football, hockey, and baseball. If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort. Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort. Or we have two other sports that are totally different. Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.
- cortesoft 4mo ago
  Basketball players are almost a completely separate population from soccer players. The shortest basketball player would almost be too tall for soccer.
  - RugnirViking 4mo ago
    "too tall for soccer" is something of a weird statement, given the large advantage height gives in the game. Even at high levels, some teams' strategy resvolves around having a couple tall guys (and many other teams keep tall guys to deal with those same strategies). It of course isn't everything, given the need for stamina, sprinting, and strength, which are hard to have all at once in a tall person. But its not uncommon for defenders and some strikers to be 6'8" or upward - average height in the premier league is 6'1" and creeping upward each year
    - dmurray 4mo ago
      It is extremely uncommon, in fact, to the extent that the English premier league doesn't have a single player "6'8" or upward". Lots of 6'4" players, though, which is comfortably tall enough for professional basketball. https://www.zonalsports.com/ranking/tallest-premier-league-players-2025-26 https://www.zonalsports.com/ranking/tallest-premier-league-p...
    - pertymcpert 4mo ago
grougnax 4mo ago
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analog31 4mo ago
I remember when in grad school, there were two casual sports leagues for the grad students: Softball and soccer. The best softball teams were the MBA and law students, who were mostly American. But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.
haunter 4mo ago
I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either. Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.
- vinni2 4mo ago
  I can’t speak for other countries but in India cricket eclipses all other sports and drains talent. But soccer is gaining popularity recently but still long way to go.
  - PaulHoule 4mo ago
    Field Hockey is huge in India too. (Thing is India is so big that anything that is big in India is big globally!)
- shevy-java 4mo ago
  If you think about it, India and China already have other very popular sports. Soccer is kind of somewhat of a niche there. Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.
  - Tade0 4mo ago
    > Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.
  - 4mo ago
shevy-java 4mo ago
I remember they were not that bad, some years ago. But sports is already heavily covered in the USA: basket ball, american football and so forth. Establishing a new sport is harder in such an environment.
JackFr 4mo ago
The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer. As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great. Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.
- tracerbulletx 4mo ago
  The is probably the most significant reason. The top athletes are pulled into other sports which have higher cultural status and financial rewards.
- lukan 4mo ago
  "Soccer is like the metric system of sports." No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it. Different sports. (I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)
  - Mallory_Ringess 4mo ago
    I think you're looking at the comparison from the wrong angle. The parent poster meant the USA does not take up the metric system because the imperial units are seen as part of their culture while metric is a 'foreign' thing. Typically American sports like baseball, American 'football' and basketball are seen as part of American culture as well while football (which for some unexplainable reason is called 'soccer' in the USA) is seen as the foreign thing, just like metric. It is not like any of these sports is better or worse in any way, in the end they're all forms of ritualised warfare without (too much) bloodshed and they all work in this regard: the winner gets the spoils, the loser gets to leave the field with their tails drooping.
    - lukan 4mo ago
josuepeq 4mo ago
My problem is I can’t stay interested for long. Yes, it’s possible that it’s a “me” problem. 90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle. If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.
- borosuxks 4mo ago
  Football (or soccer for you) can be insanely high tempo and insanely slow and boring. Depends on the game. But the low scoring is actually one of the most important things in soccer. A goal in soccer is so much more precious than in any other sport. It can win you the game, as almost a third of games have one or less goals in the game. So the euphoria when the team scores outweigh any "boringness" that preceded it. It can only be compared to a sudden death win in hockey (another relatively low scoring game, though a not as low as soccer). Those not into soccer don't really understand this, and many have tried to increase the number of goals scored. But it doesn't make the game better. An 8-2 score is much more boring than a 2-0 game, as the nerve is there all game.
  - deleted 4mo ago
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  - skydhash 4mo ago
    I got into soccer late (watching it, as I was playing it all the time as kid). The best aspect is that it can be incredibly hard to score and a goal requires good team coordination and individual skills, which must be better than those of the adverse teams. Once you get familiar with it, it becomes an anticipation game. And you on the stand usually as a better view of a play than the players. So while there’s only passing going on, you start to sense the strategy shifts. And you may even think it’s either doomed or have a high chance of success, but the opposite happens. A goal is the reward for high amount work, not a foregone conclusion. That’s what makes a penalty so painful.
- 4mo ago
SamBam 4mo ago
I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking. I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries. In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many boys are playing once or twice every day, in an unstructured format, during recess and after school. Starting from a young age, Europeans who show talent are getting drafted into soccer academies before they're 10, greatly increasing the amount of competitive play. But this is on top of the everyday soccer they're playing. For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." A local league costs money. A private high school with a good program costs money. In Europe, beyond (again) the continuous unstructured play, the academies and farm teams are free. Finally, a good European player doesn't usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18. Meanwhile, a gifted US soccer player heads to college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season, and four years later might get on one of the relatively few club teams.
- hawaiianbrah 4mo ago
  I believe most of what you said, but no college varsity player is playing only a few times a week. Even the lowest division of NCAA teams would have practice or matches 5-6 times a week in season.
  - hibikir 4mo ago
    Sure, but as far as the people that are going to be professional, and good enough to play for a national team, you'd already be playing in the top levels of soccer by 19. Lamine Yamal was playing for the A team in Barcelona when he was barely 16, and was a starter in Spain's eurocup win at 17. More "normal" players, likePedri and Messi, played their first minutes for Barcelona at 17. So if you even smell a college varsity team, you are already in the slow track. It's really rare to find a star that wasn't at least in a farm team at 15. I have a friend that was already there at 10, and his ceiling was just starter in a low tier team in La Liga.
  - 4mo ago
rdtsc 4mo ago
> The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show. That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.
- hawaiianbrah 4mo ago
  > That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. I’ve never heard that, in fact there are more boys who play in America than girls.
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  It's funny, at Cornell I think the men play soccer better than the woman unequivocally but at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but stupid game whereas the women play a much smarter game when it comes to controlling the space. A men's and women's sport that can be played with the same facilities is an economic plus -- college soccer is a great way to have fun supporting your school. It's a very different situation than field hockey, which is almost exclusively a woman's sport in the US although it is a huge men's sport in India and many other countries.
- rauljordan2020 4mo ago
  This is hilarious because we think the same about any sport that isn't soccer (football) in much of Latin America: "basketball / baseball is what girls play" is the tagline folks said growing up
  - rdtsc 4mo ago
    Absolutely. It's funny how that works in a way. And then we end up with articles like "how come such and such a sport isn't popular, it's obviously such a great sport". Some of it may be just adversarial, Americans wouldn't like soccer because well they want to feel special and different than Europeans. And likely Europeans or say Brazilians just wouldn't like American football, it just looks goofy to them.
reenorap 4mo ago
The insane level of flopping with no dignity or shame, and the insane level of allowing this to happen without any penalties is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t watch soccer. Those in charge WANT soccer players to flop but I don’t understand why. It’s dishonorable and weak but the sport does nothing to stop it. Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.
- halJordan 4mo ago
  Gamesmanship in soccer is not more egregious than in say basketball. If you look at the nonsense ronnie coleman did in his day you wouldn't be complaining about soccer players
  - dfxm12 4mo ago
    Ronnie Coleman, the bodybuilder?
- prmph 4mo ago
  If all you see in soccer is fake flopping, that means you do not really appreciate nor understand the game, you do not understand what hard and what's easy, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, etc The fake flopping happens sometimes, but overall it hardly detracts from the game. It would be like me saying false starts is why I don't watch the 100 m dash. And I'd be wary of thinking a fall is fake when the referee and the linesmen who are actually on the field think otherwise. Note that soccer is mostly not supposed to be a physical contact game. It was much more like that up to the 1070s. In fact, the infamous and relentless fouling of Pelé in the 1966 World Cup was a major catalyst for the creation of the red and yellow card system.
thrill 4mo ago
He asks if it's an MLS problem but doesn't dig into the poor management decisions that persist at the MLS level, and though he does touch on the lack of relegation, and he doesn't touch at all on the US Soccer Federation's consistently poor choices for USMNT head coach. We're presently stuck with a guy who praises the players getting into constant on-field fights and each manager constantly makes nepotistic selections for team slots who are under-performers yet constantly praised, or even worse this year, who seem to be chosen for their unfocused non-game-enhancing aggression. That sort of mis-focus might work if playing in leagues where that is the norm, but world-class players and teams play with technique, and the rough play BS lasts as long as the officials allow it and doesn't win in the long term, which is where you have to aim to win championships. It's arguable if we'd even be in the Cup this time if we weren't hosting, and I'll be surprised if we get out of the group stage this time.
TZubiri 4mo ago
I think it's that the US follows a red ocean strategy. They don't compete on saturated markets, they'd rather make their own markets and be in a market of one, like NFL.
radiator 4mo ago
I find it good that US is not better at soccer. Soccer or football has gained too much importance in Europe and South America. We have seen it encourage unprecedented levels of gambling, insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football, fan violence inside and outside the stadiums, corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics, and more.
- least 4mo ago
  The United States experiences the same sort of issues, just with different sports.
- haunter 4mo ago
  What you describe is pretty much true for every single american sport too >unprecedented levels of gambling Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings >insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe >corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music. >fan violence inside and outside the stadiums This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that
  - dh2022 4mo ago
    Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions fans have something to say about fan violence.
  - radiator 4mo ago
    OK I 've never been to the US, so I believe you. Then the problems are more widespread: not only soccer, but professional sports in general are harmful in my opinion.
gen2brain 4mo ago
That is because you call it "soccer"?
lordnacho 4mo ago
It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent. Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more. Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people. Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it. In the US, you have some special factors: - Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play. - Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter. - College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university. On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.
Mattasher 4mo ago
The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US. You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.
- weakened_malloc 4mo ago
  I love this - it seems so obvious but I had never thought about it that way!
pier25 4mo ago
It's the culture. I'm from Spain and living in Mexico. Football in these countries is almost like a religion.
- jandrewrogers 4mo ago
  Yet Mexico is no better at soccer than America, broadly speaking. There is also a general feeling that in the US is better at developing talent than Mexico at this point. Some of Mexico's best national team prospects in recent years were developed by MLS academies.
  - pier25 4mo ago
    You definitely need other factors but societal passion seems like the cornerstone. The US has everything except this. Personally couldn't care any less about sports. I say this as an external observer.
prmph 4mo ago
How come Ghana, a third world country with a much smaller population and GDP, and probably less organizational capacity, has eliminated the US twice at the world cup? Granted, the US finally got its revenge, but still... So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.
- haunter 4mo ago
  > Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play. But would you say the same about the basketball where the US is dominating both the men and woment tournaments?
Gualdrapo 4mo ago
I think in that episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" they put it much more simply - Here in South America (and Europe) soccer "is a religion".
jppope 4mo ago
The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.
- bitmasher9 4mo ago
  I don’t think this is fully correct. Athletic skill is not universal across sports. A athlete that can be trained to be a star football player may not be able to be trained to be a star baseball player.
  - dlcarrier 4mo ago
    Even though chances of succeeding in any are small, a potential athlete has far more to gain by being successful at football/basketball/baseball than at soccer. It's nearly impossible for even a star athlete to succeed at more than one sport, (see also, Michael Jordan) so anyone who wants to be a famous athlete has no incentive to train for anything other than the top three sports.
    - bitmasher9 4mo ago
      I don’t think that fully aligns with my observations. The US outputs plenty of star athletes in minor sports. Swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc. It’s not all incentives like the mythical economic rational actor, especially when we’re talking about choices adolescents are making. I think there is a more self selection process happening for athletes and sports. People with natural athletic inclinations try lots of sports young, they will do well in the ones they are most suited for, and begin taking that seriously.
      - dlcarrier 4mo ago
        No one in any country is going to be a famous athlete for swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc., so they're all competing against athletes that are also competing in that sport for the love of the sport, whereas someone playing whichever sport is called football in that country has a chance of becoming a famous athlete.
michtzik 4mo ago
The article at one point says "No two members of the 26-man roster play on the same club team" about the USMNT. However, it seems that these two players both play for PSV Eindhoven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi And also these two players both play for Borussia Mönchengladbach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna Is the article wrong? This is the only claim I bothered to check. Should I assume the rest is wrong, too?
jotaroDeon 4mo ago
After decades of hearing the same valid reasons I've recently begun to think that soccer just pales against alternatives.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
lvl155 4mo ago
This is like asking why isn’t the US better at Cricket.
plantain 4mo ago
Why do I need to age verify to read this?
avazhi 4mo ago
Because Americans don't really like the sport, it isn't popular in America, and thus nobody gets their kids to play it, resulting in Americans not really liking the sport, ad infinitum.
Kuyawa 4mo ago
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leflambeur 4mo ago
This has been mentioned, if using different words, elsewhere in this thread but soccer is much more accessible and casual in Latin America and Western Europe. Children often live in cities/towns where they have high mobility and agency to move around and so can get together without adult management and play and develop more freely. It's not like the U.S. where it's very processed (soccer camp, parents need to drive their kids to a place that's basically professionally organized), et cetera. The closest thing to that in the U.S. is kids playing basketball in Brooklyn or L.A.
- TrackerFF 4mo ago
  Having grown up in Norway, where soccer has always been very popular, accessibility is a factor - I'd agree with that. The majority of soccer we played as kids wasn't even on a pitch. If you had a wall, a football, and two objects (usually jackets) to mark the goal - you could play - and that's exactly what we did. But yeah, small neighborhood pitches were usually easy to find.
onecommentman 4mo ago
I’ll throw in my pet theory. American football is rooted in infantry maneuvers Civil War through WWII. Soccer is closer to cavalry, a Second Millennium European experience. Cavalry was never that important in the military experiences of Americans since its founding a mere 250 years ago, whereas lots of folks served in the infantry — Civil War through WWII. The US, moreover, is essentially a 20th Century country; infantry, tanks, air forces, etc. is 20th Century warfare; and American football echoes those 20th Century technologies. The romantic ideal and practical effectiveness of cavalry over many centuries, ending in the 20th Century/WWI, made it much more deeply ingrained in the European (Old World) psyche. Soccer is cavalry, thus Europe and past colonies gravitated towards it.
cuttothechase 4mo ago
Answer is simple. Why isn't U.S. better at Field hockey, Badminton, Cricket, Ping pong etc.? Ideally a capitalistic system is supposed to produce the best or close to the best in each category to stay competitive then what gives? Capitalism produces the "best" in categories where there is a high demand for a product. In the U.S., the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. This is closely entwined with "culture". This is why the U.S. leads in sports that are tailored for television and massive stadium revenue. Sports that are more nuanced, low-scoring, or lack a domestic TV or the US cultural zeigeist simply cannot compete for the attention span of the American consumer, and by extension, the capital that follows that attention.
- chrsw 4mo ago
  Is modern baseball "high-production-value entertainment"? For basketball and American football, those sports weren't exactly blockbusters either. The rules and strategies of those games have been carefully tailored over the years to cater to action and scoring, something that was never going happen to the rules (or laws) of soccer.
  - cuttothechase 4mo ago
    Agree. "Culture" provides the nurturing "gap fill" while the capital is not exactly flowing and rules are evolving over time. Culture keeps the lights on in lean years and builds camaraderie when the sports is thriving. Cannot keep count on how many times I have heard of "Babe Ruth" (1895 - 1948) mentioned in a movie/tv show entertainment context, where a grandpa or an elderly figure is fondly reminiscing things to their gen X grandkids!
- troupo 4mo ago
  > the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. What part of American football or baseball is high-scoring or high-production-value or entertaining?
  - cuttothechase 4mo ago
goatherders 4mo ago
The US isnt better at soccer because our best potential soccer players are playing defensive back or point guard. It's that simple.
sashavegas 4mo ago
Several Factors: 1.Socker does not have pause of the game as a result no add, mean not commercial $$$. Several years ago research show that none of EU socker team are profitable. 2. Boring game. Watching 90 min for maybe 1-0 score
- thenthenthen 4mo ago
  Huh half time?
bluedevil2k 4mo ago
If LeBron James grew up in England, he’d be the greatest soccer goalkeeper in history.
notepad0x90 4mo ago
why isn't russia, china, india? Sports are artifacts of culture. Although the US does remarkably well in soccer despite soccer not being a mainstay of american culture. The question should be, how come the US does so well in soccer, despite it still being a niche sport (even then mostly for older generations). Soccer is much more popular with gen-alpha and to an extent gen-z (thank youtube). A lot of the top national teams have players that play in the premier league or some other european league. The American national team (last i recall, haven't kept up) typically only play in the MLS where even then the foreign players treat it as a last stop before retirement when they do have premier league experience. iron sharpens iron, competition is what it's all about, year round. I wonder why the premier league didn't expand to the US, Canada and beyond? it has global popularity but with not logistical or technical inhibitions, it still is a europe only (keep in mind, europe is still a bunch of countries, so international) club. There aren't enough matches to make a 1-2 6-8 hour international flights a week that big of a deal (assuming a day of recovery afterwards), and/or matches can be scheduled so that they move to one side of the atlantic after a few weeks and back after a few more instead of lots of back and forth. I would say the NFL and the NBA dominate US culture, but today, the MLS and NHL are about the same level with younger generations as soccer -- if you include all of soccer as one thing instead of just the MLS.
sumanep 4mo ago
Because there´s not anything called soccer
dfxm12 4mo ago
Athletic American men can probably make more money playing another sport. You get perks like (mostly) free college. Paths to the pros are less uniform than the college -> pro pipeline, so even when the US has a generation of 11+ world class players, because they've been trained differently and play much further away from home, they can't come together with just a few weeks of training as easily as, say, a basketball team. Plus, the local competition isn't very good. It's just other middling teams and tiny countries. Conversely, the NWSL is likely the most lucrative league for women besides the WNBA. In both cases, it's a legit pipeline from college to the pros. Women's hockey is similar. So you have a group of players who know each other, have been playing together for a while and were roughly trained the same way. Also, the second best women's soccer team happens to be in their "division". They can come together as a team better than American men who all went through different training programs from youth.
foobarian 4mo ago
My related question to this was why isn't China or India better at soccer? Given the population sizes and some reasonable talented soccer player probability you would think they would be outsized. Then you have the tiny East European countries that get medals. It's fascinating
- thenthenthen 4mo ago
  It’s not so popular in China. Basketball is somehow.
athenot 4mo ago
Money. Typical amount of commercials time per game: NFL 60-65 min NBA 40-50 min MLB 40-50 min NHL 25-35 min MLS/Premier League/World Cup 10-20 min
- boringg 4mo ago
  I was going to go with money -- the amount of money to put kids through soccer in a competitive program in USA/CANADA is way more than the competitive programs in europe. That immediately drops down the amount of talent that can make it through the system + anyone who is particularly good and has any connections to europe goes there to level up faster by playing more competitive players.
- venzaspa 4mo ago
  I watched a game of American football once and was blown away by how many adverts there were. It's such a slow game too - so much stopping between tackles for deliberation (seemingly). Don't get it personally.
mikeweiss 4mo ago
Because it's not a popular professional sport here like it is everywhere else.
tj-teej 4mo ago
The most interesting point here is to look at Women's Soccer. Soccer has always included lots of psuedo-nationalist reasons why different countries are better (or why the dive, why they play conservative defense, etc). But when you look at the success of the US Women's team it's very clear that the main thing is investment in building talent. The rest of the world does it for mens soccer (football) because that's what they do. When Title 9 went into effect America put a huge amount of money (relative to other countries) into womens soccer and the US Womens team has been one of the best in the world every since.
- outside1234 4mo ago
  At the most fundamental level, men’s soccer doesn’t get the best athletes. Those go to football, basketball, and baseball. In women’s soccer they do get the best atheletes. We’ve won half of the world cups and Olympics.
exabrial 4mo ago
Because of absurd bike-shedding by soccer purists. Literally: just have a clock the counts down. That alone would reduce confusion but casual consumers who don’t understand the rules. This isn’t hard.
yanhangyhy 4mo ago
we have a idiom/joke to describe this: "美中不足" ( which origins means a flaw within beauty). but 美 also means America 中 also means China and 不 = no/not 足=foot/soccer..so Neither country is very good at football (soccer). of course china sucks more on this
manyatoms 4mo ago
It really just comes down to TV viewership. More people watch other sports so the kids want to play those instead
uhfraid 4mo ago
some good points such as lack of promotion/relegation but ultimately misses the root cause Requirements to forming a division 1 league, as determined by the ‘US Soccer Professional League Standards’: - minimum 12 teams (14 by year 3) - each team’s principal owner has individual net worth of $40M - 75% of teams located within major metro markets (at least 1M people) - 15,000 seat stadium (and enclosed) - teams located in each of the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones https://www.ussoccer.com/organization-members-directory/pro-league-standards https://www.ussoccer.com/organization-members-directory/pro-...
- uhfraid 4mo ago
  As for how these requirements were determined… no clue. Never received an answer. Jury’s still out on that… https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-soccer-must-face-trial-over-pro-soccer-league-competition-judge-rules-2024-06-12/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-soccer-must-face... https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-120/274688/20230804130535415_2023-08-04%20USSF%20v.%20Relevent%20Cert%20Petition%20and%20Appendix.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-120/274688/2023...
timeonecom 4mo ago
It’s American TV. The free to watch stations can’t show a halftime of 45 minutes without ad breaks. They couldn’t do this when TV was the only big entertainment in the last century and now TV matters less, so that window of time is gone.
emadda 4mo ago
I think this comes down to higher competition and practice in Europe. A football is the default “toy” given to young lads, and you can play anywhere with anyone. So much so there are custom “no ball games” signs in many neighbourhoods due to noise averse residents getting annoyed. There are also many supporting elders who try to improve and guide skill development.
jiwidi 4mo ago
US is the world best at american football :fireworks:
annagio_ 4mo ago
Because USA has different national sports and it never gave much attention in football like Argentina or even Germany. Still USA has amazing Basketball, with its NBA.
penguin_booze 4mo ago
It's called Football. Naming something right (like the rest of the world) is first step to getting good at it.
stgo 4mo ago
I'm sorry to say I'm glad the US are not better at soccer. Given they already have some of the finest pop artists in movies and songs, it seems to me it's a fair balance
j_m_b 4mo ago
I'm late to the game but this question has been bouncing around in my head and I wanted to give my opinion as a sports fan. I also coach my son's soccer team so to be clear, I have nothing against soccer. The real question is: Why isn't soccer more popular in the US? Soccer is a very wide game. It's easy to understand and easy to start playing. Don't touch the ball with your hands and kick the ball into the goal. It's easy enough that six year olds with coed teams can start playing and have fun. It explains the huge youth participation in the US. Soccer, however, lacks depth. Games likes baseball and football have deep strategy and specialization that soccer/basketball/hockey just can't match. It's checkers vs chess. You can develop widely different skill sets in these games. Basketball is soccer/hockey on speed. The games are a progression of incremental advantage. Each goal scored is another adrenaline shot for the fans. It's a long chain of dopamine hits. It allows for momentum shifts. It's no wonder then that the majority of athletic talent in the US is funneled into one of three sports in the US: football , baseball and basketball. The big conundrum is: Why is hockey so much more popular than soccer in America? I think it's because it's a condensed arena, faster game play and has lots of aggressive plays. Whatever the answer may be, I think it will prove key in answering why soccer just hasn't caught on professionally in the US. I don't hate soccer. I'm definitely going to be watching some world cup games. If I had a magic wand, I would implement the promotion/relegation system for every major league sport in the US. Let the owners take a haircut if they have bad teams! I think it's an excellent system which really make the owners have some skin in the game. I just don't think soccer is compelling enough of a game to draw eyeballs away from the big three.
nxy 4mo ago
Because the US overall aren’t as passionate, aka don’t care as much.

92 points by 7777777phil 4mo ago

a country can only be so good at so many sports of this type. Every american playing basketball, or baseball, or american football, or ice hockey, is one not playing football. You have to understand that for many countries, the dream path, the default one, for a very athletic young person who is interested in team sports is soccer, from the age of 6 or younger. The entire structure above that branches outward based on this huge intake of talented children, with vast institutions of professional coaches, academies, and huge amounts of training and game time with other talented people, no matter where in the country they live. Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business. This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.

PaulHoule 4mo ago
I think the rest of the world is rapidly catching up whent it comes to girls.
brewdad 4mo ago
Also, in the US until very recently, there was no path for women athletes to make sports their career after college. Soccer could be a path to a scholarship but you were going to have to get a "real" job after that even if you wanted to continue to pursue Olympic or World Cup level goals in the sport. The NWSL is changing that but salaries are still nowhere near the men's game, nor any other male dominated professional league.

hackerbeat 4mo ago

Didn't read the post, but the problem is that in most top soccer countries, soccer is the number one sport, light-years ahead of everything else. In the US, several other sports are more popular, which drains the talent pool. Kids grow up immersed in soccer culture in places like Brazil, Argentina, Germany or Spain in a way that simply isn't as common in the US.

cortesoft 4mo ago
I get this argument, and it is probably partially right, but is soccer really competing for the same athletes as basketball and American football? Basketball players are mostly too tall for soccer (other than goalie), and a majority of football players are way bigger than great soccer players. Baseball and hockey might compete for the same athletes, but a huge percentage of baseball and hockey players also come from other countries.
- bad_haircut72 4mo ago
  Kids who are good at sport excel at it all throughout school years, then once they hit college age the smaller ones dont make it further in American football any more - but they still spent their childhood playing it. In e.g. Uraguay its probably opposite, the naturally heavy guys cant compete at top level soccer (Im guessing) and fall out of professional sports
- vasco 4mo ago
  For national teams you only need to consider outlier athletes not averages. And many of the most top athletes at sport A would do very well at sport B. If a country funnels 100% of kids into a single sport, every single genetically gifted athlete will be put through the same selection process. Imagine every single physically gifted kid going to tryouts of the same sport. That's Portugal.
- cweld510 4mo ago
  It definitely is at the youth level. I don’t think any football or basketball pros could be soccer stars, but absolutely there are kids who are star point guards on their youth basketball team but top out at 5’8”, or football players who never make it past high school but could have been great at soccer.

waltfy 4mo ago

Not American. Don’t live in US. The outside impression I get is that the game simply isn’t one of the kids’ default street sports.

fsckboy 4mo ago
the US has a large relatively recent influx of Latino populations, and they play a lot of soccer, and in a number of cultures also baseball
- waltfy 4mo ago
  Interesting, I didn’t think of that. Growing up in Brazil, soccer was essentially the only sport boys played, at every opportunity. In the absence of a ball, we’d dislodge the plastic ball from a roll on deodorant packaging and play with that, or a table football ball (which hurt a lot). Then - in my late teens - studying in the UK football (soccer) was also predominant, played during breaks etc. My point being that the US is along other large nations such as India, China which culturally favour other games/sports. Contrast these nations with Uruguay for example, tiny country… has won the World Cup. I do not know this, but I’d hazard a guess that soccer is THE game in the streets of Uruguay.
- musictubes 4mo ago
  Yup. For many years in DC just about the only people that went to DC United games were Latinos. They are still the dominant supporters of professional US soccer I think. I had a surreal experience one day after work. I lived on a cul de sac and it was common to have kids play baseball or kickball in the summer. There was one Indian family on the street and the eldest boy had convinced them to try cricket that day. Heard him yelling “Bowl it! Bowl it!” So yeah, immigrants add a lot to the US including sports.
jppope 4mo ago
Correct. We actually don't play "football" properly as a street sport either though... its typically a flag style football (two hand touch, etc) but the main sports are (generally separated by season during school) football, hockey/basketball, baseball.

28304283409234 4mo ago

What are you talking about? They've been world champ repeatedly. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-history-womens-world-cup-spt-intl/ https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-histo...

tekla 4mo ago
The qualifier is literally the sub-headline and is mentioned several times in the article.
- 28304283409234 4mo ago
  Yet it is not in the submission. How am I to know you all assume male sporting events?

talktalkmake 4mo ago

In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.

bananamogul 4mo ago

Because we have 4 other sports that originated in the Americas: basketball, gridiron football, hockey, and baseball. If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort. Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort. Or we have two other sports that are totally different. Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.

cortesoft 4mo ago
Basketball players are almost a completely separate population from soccer players. The shortest basketball player would almost be too tall for soccer.
- RugnirViking 4mo ago
  "too tall for soccer" is something of a weird statement, given the large advantage height gives in the game. Even at high levels, some teams' strategy resvolves around having a couple tall guys (and many other teams keep tall guys to deal with those same strategies). It of course isn't everything, given the need for stamina, sprinting, and strength, which are hard to have all at once in a tall person. But its not uncommon for defenders and some strikers to be 6'8" or upward - average height in the premier league is 6'1" and creeping upward each year
  - dmurray 4mo ago
    It is extremely uncommon, in fact, to the extent that the English premier league doesn't have a single player "6'8" or upward". Lots of 6'4" players, though, which is comfortably tall enough for professional basketball. https://www.zonalsports.com/ranking/tallest-premier-league-players-2025-26 https://www.zonalsports.com/ranking/tallest-premier-league-p...
  - pertymcpert 4mo ago

grougnax 4mo ago

[dead]

analog31 4mo ago

I remember when in grad school, there were two casual sports leagues for the grad students: Softball and soccer. The best softball teams were the MBA and law students, who were mostly American. But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.

haunter 4mo ago

I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either. Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.

vinni2 4mo ago
I can’t speak for other countries but in India cricket eclipses all other sports and drains talent. But soccer is gaining popularity recently but still long way to go.
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  Field Hockey is huge in India too. (Thing is India is so big that anything that is big in India is big globally!)
shevy-java 4mo ago
If you think about it, India and China already have other very popular sports. Soccer is kind of somewhat of a niche there. Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.
- Tade0 4mo ago
  > Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.
- 4mo ago

shevy-java 4mo ago

I remember they were not that bad, some years ago. But sports is already heavily covered in the USA: basket ball, american football and so forth. Establishing a new sport is harder in such an environment.

JackFr 4mo ago

The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer. As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great. Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.

tracerbulletx 4mo ago
The is probably the most significant reason. The top athletes are pulled into other sports which have higher cultural status and financial rewards.
lukan 4mo ago
"Soccer is like the metric system of sports." No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it. Different sports. (I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)
- Mallory_Ringess 4mo ago
  I think you're looking at the comparison from the wrong angle. The parent poster meant the USA does not take up the metric system because the imperial units are seen as part of their culture while metric is a 'foreign' thing. Typically American sports like baseball, American 'football' and basketball are seen as part of American culture as well while football (which for some unexplainable reason is called 'soccer' in the USA) is seen as the foreign thing, just like metric. It is not like any of these sports is better or worse in any way, in the end they're all forms of ritualised warfare without (too much) bloodshed and they all work in this regard: the winner gets the spoils, the loser gets to leave the field with their tails drooping.
  - lukan 4mo ago

josuepeq 4mo ago

My problem is I can’t stay interested for long. Yes, it’s possible that it’s a “me” problem. 90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle. If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.

borosuxks 4mo ago
Football (or soccer for you) can be insanely high tempo and insanely slow and boring. Depends on the game. But the low scoring is actually one of the most important things in soccer. A goal in soccer is so much more precious than in any other sport. It can win you the game, as almost a third of games have one or less goals in the game. So the euphoria when the team scores outweigh any "boringness" that preceded it. It can only be compared to a sudden death win in hockey (another relatively low scoring game, though a not as low as soccer). Those not into soccer don't really understand this, and many have tried to increase the number of goals scored. But it doesn't make the game better. An 8-2 score is much more boring than a 2-0 game, as the nerve is there all game.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- skydhash 4mo ago
  I got into soccer late (watching it, as I was playing it all the time as kid). The best aspect is that it can be incredibly hard to score and a goal requires good team coordination and individual skills, which must be better than those of the adverse teams. Once you get familiar with it, it becomes an anticipation game. And you on the stand usually as a better view of a play than the players. So while there’s only passing going on, you start to sense the strategy shifts. And you may even think it’s either doomed or have a high chance of success, but the opposite happens. A goal is the reward for high amount work, not a foregone conclusion. That’s what makes a penalty so painful.
4mo ago

SamBam 4mo ago

I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking. I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries. In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many boys are playing once or twice every day, in an unstructured format, during recess and after school. Starting from a young age, Europeans who show talent are getting drafted into soccer academies before they're 10, greatly increasing the amount of competitive play. But this is on top of the everyday soccer they're playing. For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." A local league costs money. A private high school with a good program costs money. In Europe, beyond (again) the continuous unstructured play, the academies and farm teams are free. Finally, a good European player doesn't usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18. Meanwhile, a gifted US soccer player heads to college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season, and four years later might get on one of the relatively few club teams.

hawaiianbrah 4mo ago
I believe most of what you said, but no college varsity player is playing only a few times a week. Even the lowest division of NCAA teams would have practice or matches 5-6 times a week in season.
- hibikir 4mo ago
  Sure, but as far as the people that are going to be professional, and good enough to play for a national team, you'd already be playing in the top levels of soccer by 19. Lamine Yamal was playing for the A team in Barcelona when he was barely 16, and was a starter in Spain's eurocup win at 17. More "normal" players, likePedri and Messi, played their first minutes for Barcelona at 17. So if you even smell a college varsity team, you are already in the slow track. It's really rare to find a star that wasn't at least in a farm team at 15. I have a friend that was already there at 10, and his ceiling was just starter in a low tier team in La Liga.
- 4mo ago

rdtsc 4mo ago

> The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show. That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.

hawaiianbrah 4mo ago
> That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. I’ve never heard that, in fact there are more boys who play in America than girls.
PaulHoule 4mo ago
It's funny, at Cornell I think the men play soccer better than the woman unequivocally but at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but stupid game whereas the women play a much smarter game when it comes to controlling the space. A men's and women's sport that can be played with the same facilities is an economic plus -- college soccer is a great way to have fun supporting your school. It's a very different situation than field hockey, which is almost exclusively a woman's sport in the US although it is a huge men's sport in India and many other countries.
rauljordan2020 4mo ago
This is hilarious because we think the same about any sport that isn't soccer (football) in much of Latin America: "basketball / baseball is what girls play" is the tagline folks said growing up
- rdtsc 4mo ago
  Absolutely. It's funny how that works in a way. And then we end up with articles like "how come such and such a sport isn't popular, it's obviously such a great sport". Some of it may be just adversarial, Americans wouldn't like soccer because well they want to feel special and different than Europeans. And likely Europeans or say Brazilians just wouldn't like American football, it just looks goofy to them.

reenorap 4mo ago

The insane level of flopping with no dignity or shame, and the insane level of allowing this to happen without any penalties is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t watch soccer. Those in charge WANT soccer players to flop but I don’t understand why. It’s dishonorable and weak but the sport does nothing to stop it. Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.

halJordan 4mo ago
Gamesmanship in soccer is not more egregious than in say basketball. If you look at the nonsense ronnie coleman did in his day you wouldn't be complaining about soccer players
- dfxm12 4mo ago
  Ronnie Coleman, the bodybuilder?
prmph 4mo ago
If all you see in soccer is fake flopping, that means you do not really appreciate nor understand the game, you do not understand what hard and what's easy, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, etc The fake flopping happens sometimes, but overall it hardly detracts from the game. It would be like me saying false starts is why I don't watch the 100 m dash. And I'd be wary of thinking a fall is fake when the referee and the linesmen who are actually on the field think otherwise. Note that soccer is mostly not supposed to be a physical contact game. It was much more like that up to the 1070s. In fact, the infamous and relentless fouling of Pelé in the 1966 World Cup was a major catalyst for the creation of the red and yellow card system.

thrill 4mo ago

He asks if it's an MLS problem but doesn't dig into the poor management decisions that persist at the MLS level, and though he does touch on the lack of relegation, and he doesn't touch at all on the US Soccer Federation's consistently poor choices for USMNT head coach. We're presently stuck with a guy who praises the players getting into constant on-field fights and each manager constantly makes nepotistic selections for team slots who are under-performers yet constantly praised, or even worse this year, who seem to be chosen for their unfocused non-game-enhancing aggression. That sort of mis-focus might work if playing in leagues where that is the norm, but world-class players and teams play with technique, and the rough play BS lasts as long as the officials allow it and doesn't win in the long term, which is where you have to aim to win championships. It's arguable if we'd even be in the Cup this time if we weren't hosting, and I'll be surprised if we get out of the group stage this time.

TZubiri 4mo ago

I think it's that the US follows a red ocean strategy. They don't compete on saturated markets, they'd rather make their own markets and be in a market of one, like NFL.

radiator 4mo ago

I find it good that US is not better at soccer. Soccer or football has gained too much importance in Europe and South America. We have seen it encourage unprecedented levels of gambling, insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football, fan violence inside and outside the stadiums, corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics, and more.

least 4mo ago
The United States experiences the same sort of issues, just with different sports.
haunter 4mo ago
What you describe is pretty much true for every single american sport too >unprecedented levels of gambling Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings >insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe >corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music. >fan violence inside and outside the stadiums This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that
- dh2022 4mo ago
  Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions fans have something to say about fan violence.
- radiator 4mo ago
  OK I 've never been to the US, so I believe you. Then the problems are more widespread: not only soccer, but professional sports in general are harmful in my opinion.

gen2brain 4mo ago

That is because you call it "soccer"?

lordnacho 4mo ago

It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent. Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more. Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people. Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it. In the US, you have some special factors: - Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play. - Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter. - College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university. On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.

Mattasher 4mo ago

The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US. You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.

weakened_malloc 4mo ago
I love this - it seems so obvious but I had never thought about it that way!

pier25 4mo ago

It's the culture. I'm from Spain and living in Mexico. Football in these countries is almost like a religion.

jandrewrogers 4mo ago
Yet Mexico is no better at soccer than America, broadly speaking. There is also a general feeling that in the US is better at developing talent than Mexico at this point. Some of Mexico's best national team prospects in recent years were developed by MLS academies.
- pier25 4mo ago
  You definitely need other factors but societal passion seems like the cornerstone. The US has everything except this. Personally couldn't care any less about sports. I say this as an external observer.

prmph 4mo ago

How come Ghana, a third world country with a much smaller population and GDP, and probably less organizational capacity, has eliminated the US twice at the world cup? Granted, the US finally got its revenge, but still... So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.

haunter 4mo ago
> Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play. But would you say the same about the basketball where the US is dominating both the men and woment tournaments?

Gualdrapo 4mo ago

I think in that episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" they put it much more simply - Here in South America (and Europe) soccer "is a religion".

jppope 4mo ago

The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.

bitmasher9 4mo ago
I don’t think this is fully correct. Athletic skill is not universal across sports. A athlete that can be trained to be a star football player may not be able to be trained to be a star baseball player.
- dlcarrier 4mo ago
  Even though chances of succeeding in any are small, a potential athlete has far more to gain by being successful at football/basketball/baseball than at soccer. It's nearly impossible for even a star athlete to succeed at more than one sport, (see also, Michael Jordan) so anyone who wants to be a famous athlete has no incentive to train for anything other than the top three sports.
  - bitmasher9 4mo ago
    I don’t think that fully aligns with my observations. The US outputs plenty of star athletes in minor sports. Swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc. It’s not all incentives like the mythical economic rational actor, especially when we’re talking about choices adolescents are making. I think there is a more self selection process happening for athletes and sports. People with natural athletic inclinations try lots of sports young, they will do well in the ones they are most suited for, and begin taking that seriously.
    - dlcarrier 4mo ago
      No one in any country is going to be a famous athlete for swimming, boxing, gymnastics, etc., so they're all competing against athletes that are also competing in that sport for the love of the sport, whereas someone playing whichever sport is called football in that country has a chance of becoming a famous athlete.

michtzik 4mo ago

The article at one point says "No two members of the 26-man roster play on the same club team" about the USMNT. However, it seems that these two players both play for PSV Eindhoven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi And also these two players both play for Borussia Mönchengladbach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna Is the article wrong? This is the only claim I bothered to check. Should I assume the rest is wrong, too?

jotaroDeon 4mo ago

After decades of hearing the same valid reasons I've recently begun to think that soccer just pales against alternatives.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

lvl155 4mo ago

This is like asking why isn’t the US better at Cricket.

plantain 4mo ago

Why do I need to age verify to read this?

avazhi 4mo ago

Because Americans don't really like the sport, it isn't popular in America, and thus nobody gets their kids to play it, resulting in Americans not really liking the sport, ad infinitum.

Kuyawa 4mo ago

[dead]

leflambeur 4mo ago

This has been mentioned, if using different words, elsewhere in this thread but soccer is much more accessible and casual in Latin America and Western Europe. Children often live in cities/towns where they have high mobility and agency to move around and so can get together without adult management and play and develop more freely. It's not like the U.S. where it's very processed (soccer camp, parents need to drive their kids to a place that's basically professionally organized), et cetera. The closest thing to that in the U.S. is kids playing basketball in Brooklyn or L.A.

TrackerFF 4mo ago
Having grown up in Norway, where soccer has always been very popular, accessibility is a factor - I'd agree with that. The majority of soccer we played as kids wasn't even on a pitch. If you had a wall, a football, and two objects (usually jackets) to mark the goal - you could play - and that's exactly what we did. But yeah, small neighborhood pitches were usually easy to find.

onecommentman 4mo ago

I’ll throw in my pet theory. American football is rooted in infantry maneuvers Civil War through WWII. Soccer is closer to cavalry, a Second Millennium European experience. Cavalry was never that important in the military experiences of Americans since its founding a mere 250 years ago, whereas lots of folks served in the infantry — Civil War through WWII. The US, moreover, is essentially a 20th Century country; infantry, tanks, air forces, etc. is 20th Century warfare; and American football echoes those 20th Century technologies. The romantic ideal and practical effectiveness of cavalry over many centuries, ending in the 20th Century/WWI, made it much more deeply ingrained in the European (Old World) psyche. Soccer is cavalry, thus Europe and past colonies gravitated towards it.

cuttothechase 4mo ago

Answer is simple. Why isn't U.S. better at Field hockey, Badminton, Cricket, Ping pong etc.? Ideally a capitalistic system is supposed to produce the best or close to the best in each category to stay competitive then what gives? Capitalism produces the "best" in categories where there is a high demand for a product. In the U.S., the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. This is closely entwined with "culture". This is why the U.S. leads in sports that are tailored for television and massive stadium revenue. Sports that are more nuanced, low-scoring, or lack a domestic TV or the US cultural zeigeist simply cannot compete for the attention span of the American consumer, and by extension, the capital that follows that attention.

chrsw 4mo ago
Is modern baseball "high-production-value entertainment"? For basketball and American football, those sports weren't exactly blockbusters either. The rules and strategies of those games have been carefully tailored over the years to cater to action and scoring, something that was never going happen to the rules (or laws) of soccer.
- cuttothechase 4mo ago
  Agree. "Culture" provides the nurturing "gap fill" while the capital is not exactly flowing and rules are evolving over time. Culture keeps the lights on in lean years and builds camaraderie when the sports is thriving. Cannot keep count on how many times I have heard of "Babe Ruth" (1895 - 1948) mentioned in a movie/tv show entertainment context, where a grandpa or an elderly figure is fondly reminiscing things to their gen X grandkids!
troupo 4mo ago
> the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. What part of American football or baseball is high-scoring or high-production-value or entertaining?
- cuttothechase 4mo ago

goatherders 4mo ago

The US isnt better at soccer because our best potential soccer players are playing defensive back or point guard. It's that simple.

sashavegas 4mo ago

Several Factors: 1.Socker does not have pause of the game as a result no add, mean not commercial $$$. Several years ago research show that none of EU socker team are profitable. 2. Boring game. Watching 90 min for maybe 1-0 score

thenthenthen 4mo ago
Huh half time?

bluedevil2k 4mo ago

If LeBron James grew up in England, he’d be the greatest soccer goalkeeper in history.

notepad0x90 4mo ago

why isn't russia, china, india? Sports are artifacts of culture. Although the US does remarkably well in soccer despite soccer not being a mainstay of american culture. The question should be, how come the US does so well in soccer, despite it still being a niche sport (even then mostly for older generations). Soccer is much more popular with gen-alpha and to an extent gen-z (thank youtube). A lot of the top national teams have players that play in the premier league or some other european league. The American national team (last i recall, haven't kept up) typically only play in the MLS where even then the foreign players treat it as a last stop before retirement when they do have premier league experience. iron sharpens iron, competition is what it's all about, year round. I wonder why the premier league didn't expand to the US, Canada and beyond? it has global popularity but with not logistical or technical inhibitions, it still is a europe only (keep in mind, europe is still a bunch of countries, so international) club. There aren't enough matches to make a 1-2 6-8 hour international flights a week that big of a deal (assuming a day of recovery afterwards), and/or matches can be scheduled so that they move to one side of the atlantic after a few weeks and back after a few more instead of lots of back and forth. I would say the NFL and the NBA dominate US culture, but today, the MLS and NHL are about the same level with younger generations as soccer -- if you include all of soccer as one thing instead of just the MLS.

sumanep 4mo ago

Because there´s not anything called soccer

dfxm12 4mo ago

Athletic American men can probably make more money playing another sport. You get perks like (mostly) free college. Paths to the pros are less uniform than the college -> pro pipeline, so even when the US has a generation of 11+ world class players, because they've been trained differently and play much further away from home, they can't come together with just a few weeks of training as easily as, say, a basketball team. Plus, the local competition isn't very good. It's just other middling teams and tiny countries. Conversely, the NWSL is likely the most lucrative league for women besides the WNBA. In both cases, it's a legit pipeline from college to the pros. Women's hockey is similar. So you have a group of players who know each other, have been playing together for a while and were roughly trained the same way. Also, the second best women's soccer team happens to be in their "division". They can come together as a team better than American men who all went through different training programs from youth.

foobarian 4mo ago

My related question to this was why isn't China or India better at soccer? Given the population sizes and some reasonable talented soccer player probability you would think they would be outsized. Then you have the tiny East European countries that get medals. It's fascinating

thenthenthen 4mo ago
It’s not so popular in China. Basketball is somehow.

athenot 4mo ago

Money. Typical amount of commercials time per game: NFL 60-65 min NBA 40-50 min MLB 40-50 min NHL 25-35 min MLS/Premier League/World Cup 10-20 min

boringg 4mo ago
I was going to go with money -- the amount of money to put kids through soccer in a competitive program in USA/CANADA is way more than the competitive programs in europe. That immediately drops down the amount of talent that can make it through the system + anyone who is particularly good and has any connections to europe goes there to level up faster by playing more competitive players.
venzaspa 4mo ago
I watched a game of American football once and was blown away by how many adverts there were. It's such a slow game too - so much stopping between tackles for deliberation (seemingly). Don't get it personally.

mikeweiss 4mo ago

Because it's not a popular professional sport here like it is everywhere else.

tj-teej 4mo ago

The most interesting point here is to look at Women's Soccer. Soccer has always included lots of psuedo-nationalist reasons why different countries are better (or why the dive, why they play conservative defense, etc). But when you look at the success of the US Women's team it's very clear that the main thing is investment in building talent. The rest of the world does it for mens soccer (football) because that's what they do. When Title 9 went into effect America put a huge amount of money (relative to other countries) into womens soccer and the US Womens team has been one of the best in the world every since.

outside1234 4mo ago
At the most fundamental level, men’s soccer doesn’t get the best athletes. Those go to football, basketball, and baseball. In women’s soccer they do get the best atheletes. We’ve won half of the world cups and Olympics.

exabrial 4mo ago

Because of absurd bike-shedding by soccer purists. Literally: just have a clock the counts down. That alone would reduce confusion but casual consumers who don’t understand the rules. This isn’t hard.

yanhangyhy 4mo ago

we have a idiom/joke to describe this: "美中不足" ( which origins means a flaw within beauty). but 美 also means America 中 also means China and 不 = no/not 足=foot/soccer..so Neither country is very good at football (soccer). of course china sucks more on this

manyatoms 4mo ago

It really just comes down to TV viewership. More people watch other sports so the kids want to play those instead

uhfraid 4mo ago

some good points such as lack of promotion/relegation but ultimately misses the root cause Requirements to forming a division 1 league, as determined by the ‘US Soccer Professional League Standards’: - minimum 12 teams (14 by year 3) - each team’s principal owner has individual net worth of $40M - 75% of teams located within major metro markets (at least 1M people) - 15,000 seat stadium (and enclosed) - teams located in each of the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones https://www.ussoccer.com/organization-members-directory/pro-league-standards https://www.ussoccer.com/organization-members-directory/pro-...

uhfraid 4mo ago
As for how these requirements were determined… no clue. Never received an answer. Jury’s still out on that… https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-soccer-must-face-trial-over-pro-soccer-league-competition-judge-rules-2024-06-12/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-soccer-must-face... https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-120/274688/20230804130535415_2023-08-04%20USSF%20v.%20Relevent%20Cert%20Petition%20and%20Appendix.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-120/274688/2023...

timeonecom 4mo ago

It’s American TV. The free to watch stations can’t show a halftime of 45 minutes without ad breaks. They couldn’t do this when TV was the only big entertainment in the last century and now TV matters less, so that window of time is gone.

emadda 4mo ago

I think this comes down to higher competition and practice in Europe. A football is the default “toy” given to young lads, and you can play anywhere with anyone. So much so there are custom “no ball games” signs in many neighbourhoods due to noise averse residents getting annoyed. There are also many supporting elders who try to improve and guide skill development.

jiwidi 4mo ago

US is the world best at american football :fireworks:

annagio_ 4mo ago

Because USA has different national sports and it never gave much attention in football like Argentina or even Germany. Still USA has amazing Basketball, with its NBA.

penguin_booze 4mo ago

It's called Football. Naming something right (like the rest of the world) is first step to getting good at it.

stgo 4mo ago

I'm sorry to say I'm glad the US are not better at soccer. Given they already have some of the finest pop artists in movies and songs, it seems to me it's a fair balance

j_m_b 4mo ago

I'm late to the game but this question has been bouncing around in my head and I wanted to give my opinion as a sports fan. I also coach my son's soccer team so to be clear, I have nothing against soccer. The real question is: Why isn't soccer more popular in the US? Soccer is a very wide game. It's easy to understand and easy to start playing. Don't touch the ball with your hands and kick the ball into the goal. It's easy enough that six year olds with coed teams can start playing and have fun. It explains the huge youth participation in the US. Soccer, however, lacks depth. Games likes baseball and football have deep strategy and specialization that soccer/basketball/hockey just can't match. It's checkers vs chess. You can develop widely different skill sets in these games. Basketball is soccer/hockey on speed. The games are a progression of incremental advantage. Each goal scored is another adrenaline shot for the fans. It's a long chain of dopamine hits. It allows for momentum shifts. It's no wonder then that the majority of athletic talent in the US is funneled into one of three sports in the US: football , baseball and basketball. The big conundrum is: Why is hockey so much more popular than soccer in America? I think it's because it's a condensed arena, faster game play and has lots of aggressive plays. Whatever the answer may be, I think it will prove key in answering why soccer just hasn't caught on professionally in the US. I don't hate soccer. I'm definitely going to be watching some world cup games. If I had a magic wand, I would implement the promotion/relegation system for every major league sport in the US. Let the owners take a haircut if they have bad teams! I think it's an excellent system which really make the owners have some skin in the game. I just don't think soccer is compelling enough of a game to draw eyeballs away from the big three.

nxy 4mo ago

Because the US overall aren’t as passionate, aka don’t care as much.