Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc. And often enough adults join in because they were once the kids too.

So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly.

One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol.

Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference.

Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.

I'm from Honduras, which is also quite a poor country, and the sport (soccer) is all we do and all everyone talks about. It's a core part of our society and a core part just what one does as a human, so since we are kids we think of always kicking a ball around no matter where you are, even fashioning balls from socks tied together or rubber bands, and we all learn how to control them really well even barefoot, in difficult terrain, in rain, sun, shine, anything. It isn't a structured activity. Coming to the US I realized so many American sports need a ton of setup...lots of expensive equipment, a full squad, a special field (baseball), etc. and not just something you can do easily on the street with your friends. It isn't "lived and breathed" as it is where I'm from, and we have so many incredible players. Unfortunately, we are a poor country so the best players won't become professionals and instead pursue other careers, so our national team isn't great, but I know guys that could easily be pros in Europe if they went down that path

I think you are overlooking the more obvious answer. All the talent gets sucked up by the nfl/nba/mlb.

What about baseball travel teams? Our kid plays travel soccer and it is expensive no doubt but our baseball parent friends pay more. I don't hear anyone complaining that baseball is pay to play.

Also, from what I hear hockey is also extremely expensive. I've heard that you can't leave a sporting goods store without spending at least $1,000 on gear alone for a season. I've yet to hear anyone complain that hockey is pay to play.

I think the other commenter has it right, most kids just gravitate towards American Football, Baseball, or Basketball.

And in the state I live in, of probably the top five soccer teams, one is a private school, the rest are public.

Edit: I don't know if other sports are like this but so many soccer parents are just extremely unrealistic/toxic. So many think they have the next superstar, questioning the coach on their child's play time, whey their kids didn't get placed on higher leveled teams, questioning why a coach is running practices certain ways.

> Finally, a good European player doesn't necessarily head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 18 or 19.

My guess is that less than 5% of european soccer players ever set a foot in College, at least in the biggest Leagues (UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany). I only know two: Lampard and Iniesta. There might be a few more, but they are oddities.

If anything, a good player and good student usually has to make a choice at 18 years old: "am I good enough to bet my future on being a pro player and delay/abandon the College, or do I give up on being pro and focus on studying?"

The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).

Soccer has major competition in the US.

Because these sports started in America too, America usually dominates them.

This is pretty much true for all high level competition in the US.

It’s extremely hard to get good at chess. It’s extremely hard to get good at math. It’s extremely hard to get good at gymnastics. It’s extremely hard to get good at Piano.

Meanwhile, in China or Russia, there are dedicated schools for mass producing concert, pianist, etc.

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.

The same is basically true for most other sports in the US too, and yet there are still high-level Americans. Certainly baseball (which other countries do still play in a limited fashion), hockey and football. With football we are undisputed world champs for the last 60 years! Joking aside, there is no doubt that high-level NFL players are seriously talented and their whole sport revolves around structured practices and weekly games.

Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.

I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.

I don't think the unstructured format directly contributes to the playing strength but rather attracts more player to play in a local club. Even in the town where I life with less than 100'000 people there are 10 clubs, 168 teams and nearly 3000 (mostly semi-professional) soccer player. Of course not all of them are young anymore but extrapolate this numbers to the population of a country it becomes a huge talent pool available for the major clubs.

And compared to the US there is a far more dense competition as any state has its own national league and on top are the Champions, Europe and Conference league. So every major soccer team plays in a national and a europene league at the same time and thus the players get of course much more routine.

But hey, we suck at baseball and basketball.

At my high school and college, the best athletes were playing Football or basketball not soccer. If some of those athletic running backs were playing soccer all their life they would've been a problem.

Isn't soccer a mostly women's sport in the USA? Do boys even play it at all?

The USA women's team is world class, probably for this reason.

In the UK boys mostly play soccer while girls traditionally played netball (basketball).

+1. Want to add that in Europe promising players drafted by clubs by age of 10 already get soccer equipment and some token money ($50 / week), practice every day after school and transportation to out of town games is on the club’s bus. In the US at that age parents pay for the equipment, and drive their kids to every game-including out of town. And because US is so large these are long drives.

Yes, this is it.

> 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

wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?

Also, now with NIL etc, college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league

Despite the fairly similar cultural and financial incentives at play in Europe & South America, France and Spain (Portugal to an extent, as well) pretty much lead the footballing world in terms of elite talent. Their depth is ridiculous.

For France, their sporting renaissance, if we can call it that, started way earlier in the late 1960s with what we'd call "DEI" today: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-...

For Spain, correctly focusing on developing in-game intelligence and skill was key in out-competing stronger & taller teams (at a time when rapidly improving football pitches were proving great for playing positional & possession-based game): A very 1970s Dutch way of playing kick-started by Johan Cruyff in 1990s at Barcelona, and converted into concrete results for the national team by Luis Aragones & Vincente del Bosque in 2000s/2010s: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that...

> For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play."

This is true for most sports (and activities) in the US. Additionally, the US doesn't have the concept of unstructured play, as many (most?) kids are fully depend on the parent or the school to take them places, since most of the US is so car-dependent.

All I know to write about here is China: school is one massive obstacle for professional sports. Lots of kids in China try out tons of different hobbies and sports, and any sport or activity you can think of likely has a number of clubs in bigger cities, enough to create a community of people with a serious interest. I'm thinking of Chinese kids I know personally who are into football, breakdancing, archery, ballet, drama, all kinds of stuff.

And then, right at a child's age where European scouts are noticing kids over there, in China parents are hit with massive, massive pressure to help their kids academically as best they can. Good middle school -> good high school -> good university -> good job. Unless your kid is far and away a natural talent easily exceeding their peers, you're going to hesitate to let them devote more time to professionally developing athletic ability. Athletic competition at the highest levels in China is intense due to the number of natural talents you get in a large population, and with every year that goes by without your kid quite making it into the professional-athlete track, the pressure gets higher to abandon that track and focus on academics.

So the athletic practice, even for a quite promising kid, gets sidelined for more study time and after-school classes. And this happens even for kids with parents who want them to have a balanced life without the insane pressure for academics the Chinese school system is known for. For those families it just takes the shape of cutting back the athletic practice instead of nurturing it to a possibly professional level.

One other factor that I can think of is just a culture of family interest. I don't know any Chinese men older than 45 who are into watching sports at all, whereas in the West (and also India, I think?) it's common for a family interest in sports to have already existed for generations. I do know Chinese men my age (31) who are into basketball and have young kids who might grow up with that interest. That's all anecdotal, I know, but my sample is big enough for it to be surprising to me in comparison to other places.

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.

What interesting is that unlike other nations in that list, Indonesians already love soccer to death, literally. But they're still very underrepresented in the world stage.

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.

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.

This comment is wild :) In Europe we send our best athletes into athletics, not sport. Athletics is track and field, which reduces to speed, strength and endurance. Sport - football, cricket, tennis - is about technical mastery first, and only secondarily the speed strength and endurance to support it. Lionel Messi and Sachin Tendulkar would both have been deselected by any athletic selection procedure. The emphasis on athleticism over technical mastery is what makes American sport boring.

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.

The root cause is that no one watches soccer so there’s no money in it. It’s not like there’s a limit of 3 sports we could send athletes to, but since no one watches soccer here there’s no money for fields, equipment, training, coaching, athletic science, etc.

It's slightly more than that. These sports (and let's include hockey, since it's played widely intentionally too) are all organized the same way, meaning the players are largely trained the same way leading up to college and also in the pros. There's a clear pipeline to the basketball and hockey national teams. The best league is the one closest to home. The uniform pipeline and playing close to home makes training for, coaching and playing with the national team that much easier, which makes the team that much better.

American men gotta find their own way to become a world class soccer player. There's no pipeline like there is for the big 4. It's harder for teammates to gel when some went through the ranks in Germany, some in England, some in Italy and have only a few weeks with a new coach to buy into the system.

America's biggest rivals also aren't very good. So while the best European and South American teams constantly have to play each other and fight for survival, the US has to play middling teams like Mexico and Canada and tiny Central American and island nations.

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.

I think that is a contributor to the problem but the real problem is we do not yet know how to develop talent consistently in the US. FC Barcelona is easily the world reference recruiting kids around 7-8 years old and building them mentally, physically and tactically into incredible players. Something like half or more of their current roster came through la masía at some point. And something like half the Spain world cup roster plays for Barcelona.

There are soccer academies in the US but it is still relatively new and we do not have a great development model yet. Youth academies are also fairly antithetical to how talent pipelines work for the established US sports.

It’s not so popular in China. Basketball is somehow.

It's not. The first time I ever saw kids playing soccer on their own with no adult supervision was when I left the US. I haven't seen it since I've been back. I think that's the most glaring "issue" right there.

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.

This is part of it, but you only need a few dozen great players to put together a program. Another part is organization. Italy has kids playing calcio in the streets by default, but FIGC has been run poorly for decades. USSF tries, but similarly is a little in over their heads.

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

I think the rest of the world is rapidly catching up whent it comes to girls.

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.

> 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?

Lol it’s the same with the sports in America. People love gambling on sports no matter what country they live in.

The United States experiences the same sort of issues, just with different sports.

Everything you said (gambling, fan violence, billionaires who get money from cash strapped cities) applies to the US. If you substitute soccer with NFL, MLB, and NBA the statement stands.

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

The is probably the most significant reason. The top athletes are pulled into other sports which have higher cultural status and financial rewards.

"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)

Huh half time?

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

In addition to the sibling comment, I'd say that to enjoy the game, you really need to appreciate what's hard, the incredible acrobatic feats the players do, the intricate positional maneuvers, and how much training goes into all that.

But I guess it is hard to do that later in life, if you did not grow up in a football (soccer) culture, maybe playing recreationally as a boy, and avidly following the game.

I think it’s hard to truly appreciate any sport you haven’t played yourself. I personally cannot get excited about baseball, and it’s probably mostly because of my own lack of playing experience.

The qualifier is literally the sub-headline and is mentioned several times in the article.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Basketball players are almost a completely separate population from soccer players. The shortest basketball player would almost be too tall for soccer.