> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".

That’s crazy, in the Netherlands (though about 16x smaller than Texas) the 10 biggest stadiums in the country are Football (soccer) stadiums ranging from 10400 capacity at #10 to about 56000 capacity for the #1 stadium (build for 130 million euro). All at the highest paid level of professional football.

30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!

To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team

That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth*

College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses.

* There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth