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

Absolutely. It's funny how that works in a way. And then we end up with articles like "how come such and such a sport isn't popular, it's obviously such a great sport".

Some of it may be just adversarial, Americans wouldn't like soccer because well they want to feel special and different than Europeans. And likely Europeans or say Brazilians just wouldn't like American football, it just looks goofy to them.