6 out of 8 teams in the quarterfinals are from Europe. 1 South American team and 1 African team. Europe is the SEC of soccer?? Ughh
Europe is more like the Big Ten. SEC is South America.
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In the greater Houston area soccer is VERY popular. I’ll be working at my desk half watching World Cup in a second window thinking nobody else is watching.
Anytime a Latin American country scores I can hear a roar through the walls
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I was really rooting for Colombia. I know and have worked with a number of Colombians.
Yeah, there’s quite a lot of soccer watched stateside. It’s just Liga MX or the Premier League or the Champions League instead of MLS (who have repeatedly turned a machine gun on their own foot for the last decade.)
And yet, even those leagues don’t get the ratings of the NHL in the USA once the Stanley Cup playoffs are taken into account.
Pro soccer is a pretty distant #5 in the USA as team sport followings in the USA go.
In elementary school, soccer is king
It was when I was a kid too.
Didn’t make a difference.
As adults, we all followed other pro sports more closely.
So is recess and milk in a paper box. 
People can talk about how “popular” it is all they want, but the results speak for themselves. Soccer doesn’t command the resources and commitment required to develop high-level talent to win at the highest level.
There aren’t many American kids growing up dreaming of playing professional soccer, especially not compared to the NFL, NBA, or MLB. Soccer in America is a kids’ game that people watch on TV when college football or basketball isn’t on.
My students wear Messi and Ronaldo jerseys, guven the resources they would continue to the highest level.
But they won’t unless something changes in US sports.
The context that this misses is that the most-followed soccer leagues in the US don’t get to benefit from local viewership; if we considered only out-of-market viewership, the NHL’s alleged lead vanishes, despite European leagues being constrained to early-morning and midday timeslots on less-popular networks. ESPN on ABC aired a whopping zero regular-season NHL games featuring two Canadian teams last year, and there’s a reason for that.
A better comparison is that the USA’s World Cup game against Bosnia and Herzegovina drew 10 million more viewers than the USA-Canada Olympic Gold Medal game earlier this year, and the USA-Belgium game drew three million more than that. In other words, a round-of-32 game in a sport that we’re kinda mediocre at drew 50% higher viewership than the Gold Medal game featuring the biggest international rivalry in the sport that you’re claiming is substantially more popular. And it’s not just because the US was the host this year; even in Qatar in 2022, the least-viewed USA match (vs Wales) beat viewership numbers for the Olympic Semifinal this year vs. Slovenia.
In basically every non-NHL market in the US – the places where we can get an apples-to-apples comparison – the NHL likely lags far behind the most popular soccer leagues.
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No soccer league, foreign or domestic, can match the ratings of the Stanley Cup playoffs in the USA.
Not close.
That makes soccer a clear #5 in the USA. Not likely to change during our lifetimes.
At least we dominate the womens’ side.
I mean, the World Cup is great, but that’s only once every four years.
It’s NOT the norm. It’s a once every four years anomaly.
MLS has stupidly done the money grab and put 90% of the games on Apple TV Plus, thus, guaranteeing themselves low ratings, and any chance of building the sport in the USA. Terrible move. I would love to watch the Houston Dynamo, but I am unwilling to pay a subscription to do so.
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The Olympics are also a quadrennial anomaly. It’s an apples-to-apples comparison. Once every four years people who don’t have a rooting interest in the domestic leagues tune into the international version of the sport. And when they do, soccer beats the absolute brakes off hockey.
The Stanley Cup Playoffs are big locally. But for example, Game 1 of Leafs-Sens last year averaged less than 800k viewers on this side of the border. That’s less than the average Club America regular-season game. Without a local rooting interest, NHL viewership falls off a cliff, well below soccer.
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No that makes NHL more popular than any one soccer league. The NHL dominates US hockey fans’ interest in a way that none of the many popular soccer leagues can consolidate US soccer fans’ interest. This does not mean that hockey is more popular than soccer in general
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A couple of other rules of thumb worth considering:
- In Houston or Atlanta or Portland, do you think it’s easier to find a watch party for a Premier League team or an NHL team?
- Do you think more people in the US are familiar with Ovechkin (or whoever else the most popular NHL player is) or with Messi?
- What do you think NHL ratings would look like if they regularly played games at 6AM?
Even if you aggregated TV ratings from every pro soccer league, soccer will still likely fall well below the Stanley Cup playoffs.
MLS is on Apple TV.
Other pro soccer leagues barely match NHL regular season numbers.
As a spectator and TV sport, soccer is clearly number five in popularity on an annual basis.
The once every four years anomaly of the World Cup hardly indicates otherwise.
From a spectator attendance prospective across all levels soccer blows away hockey
Yes, the Olympics are once every four years.
That’s about the only time track and field gets a lot of eyeballs in the USA.
Same for soccer with the World Cup.
That’s the whole point.
T&F otherwise gets little attention.
Soccer likewise ordinarily gets way fewer eyeballs than NHL hockey outside the World Cup once very four years.
That’s why BOTH are less popular than hockey as spectator/TV sports as a general rule.
Soccer is #5.
T&F is way down the list as a spectator and TV sport.