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.

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.