Soccer Still Invisible

This will probably not shock those that know me but I just can't get into this sport. Well, that is not quite true. I do enjoy the USWNT play. They are uber talented and a proven winner and fun to watch. For the rest of the sport I'm somewhere between meh and yawn.

Apparently I'm not the only one here in the US not watching the current World Cup. I have so many issues with this sport played by the men and run by an organization that actually gave the felon in chief a medal for being a peacemaker. Any chance of me giving them an opportunity to win me over ended in that ten seconds.

But that isn't the only issue. Who has a month to invest in a tournament? Do they really need to make the final teams over one hundred teams? Wouldn't it be smarter and quicker to have some kind of four year ranking system that brings it down to the final fifty to move this along?

Ratings for this tournament so far have been record setting for soccer but still less than stellar. The most watched match, in the US, was the USA vs Paraguay as 18 million watched. This was the most watched soccer match ever in the US. Second place was an earlier match between the USA and Australia as 14 million watched.

The women, in 2023, who were expected to win this, and did, had their best viewership versus the Netherlands when 6.4 million watched. This was half as many that watched these same two teams in 2019 when they had 13.9 million watching. And that was less than watched them play Japan in 2015 as 16 million tuned in to see them win it again. That is not a good trend for the most dominant team in the world, men or women.

To put this in perspective. The last four Super Bowls had 125.0, 127.7, 125.0, and 114.2 million viewers, that is six hundred percent more viewers than the top soccer audience. The World Series averaged over 15 million viewers for the last two series and the NCAA football Championship Game had over 30 million in January tune in to watch.

For the sports above that weren't the Super Bowl, viewership greatly depends on the teams playing. If there isn't an East Coast team playing the audience tends to tune out which is what happened to both baseball and the NCAA football games.

For thirty years we've been told that youth soccer was going to make this sport the biggest sport in the USA as kids were playing all over. In fact there are over ten thousand clubs in the US. They have over one million administrators/volunteers/coaches helping manage pre diabetic 2.5 million kids. This is the same amount of kids playing in 2026 that they had in 2015. Some growth.

What we Americans have proved is that soccer is as popular as the metric system here.