How Major League Soccer became increasingly popular in the U.S amid clubs receiving more revenue from sponsorships and television as teams poach top talent.
The United States has for a long time favored football and basketball as their national sports but soccer continues to make up ground as time goes on.
In the last few years, Major League Soccer has become much stronger. The Argentinian and Brazilian leagues have become a common hunting ground for MLS clubs to poach top talent.
The MLS has become a viable league for players to develop in, partly due to an increase in the popularity of soccer in the nation. This means that clubs receive more revenue from sponsorships and television.
The US National football team
This sports streaming infographic shows the rise in the popularity of soccer in the US since 2017. We can see that soccer streaming is now more popular than the streaming of the nation’s traditional sports, baseball and ice hockey. In the past, soccer was dismissed as a European sport but the growth of the US national team shows how far the sport has come in North America.
The current generation of young soccer players emerging in the US is representative of the sport’s development within the nation in the 21st century. The current crop of stars that will head to the Qatar World Cup this year experienced the early stages of a soccer boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and have grown up watching and practicing the sport.
All smiles to start September camp 😁#USMNT x @BioSteelSports pic.twitter.com/Crr4lXcFlb
— U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team (@USMNT) September 19, 2022
The reasons for soccer’s growth
Over this period of time, more and more young people opted for soccer as a tertiary sport rather than baseball or ice hockey like past generations might have.
The growth of the MLS has provided a gateway into the sport for many people and now there is a huge interest in the US for European football with deals now amounting to billions of dollars. Paramount’s UEFA Champions deal amounts to around $1.5 billion over six years.
Much of the sport’s growth can be owed to the ease with which it can be played. Young people simply need a ball to play the sport anywhere. However, sports like baseball need much more equipment and space, whilst ice hockey, for example, requires a specific venue that not all may be able to access.
Young people for the most part enjoy sports they can relate to, sports they understand and can enjoy themselves. This leads us to the question, how did soccer not become popular much earlier in the US?
TV deals could provide a large part of the answer, as before they started broadcasting the sport, it was difficult to follow soccer in the US. Watching soccer has only been easily accessible for the past couple of generations. However, sports like NFL football and NBA basketball underpin American culture and have been widely available on TV for decades. The NBA, for example, was already available on cable TV as early as the 1980s.
A huge win at home for the @LAGalaxy! pic.twitter.com/cMiROFqyZh
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) September 18, 2022
Soccer will likely continue its growing trend and will be broadcasted to an increased amount of people as time goes on. There is little reason to think otherwise and, who knows, it may even become the number one sport in the US in the future.
