Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries.

In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many boys are playing once or twice every day, in an unstructured format, during recess and after school.

Starting from a young age, Europeans who show talent are getting drafted into soccer academies before they're 10, greatly increasing the amount of competitive play. But this is on top of the everyday soccer they're playing.

For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." A local league costs money. A private high school with a good program costs money. In Europe, beyond (again) the continuous unstructured play, the academies and farm teams are free.

Finally, a good European player doesn't usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18.

Meanwhile, a gifted US soccer player heads to 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, and four years later might get on one of the relatively few club teams.

You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.

Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.

The closest thing to that in the U.S. is kids playing basketball in Brooklyn or L.A.

Typical amount of commercials time per game:

    NFL                          60-65 min
    NBA                          40-50 min
    MLB                          40-50 min
    NHL                          25-35 min
    MLS/Premier League/World Cup 10-20 min

Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business.

This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.

Soccer has always included lots of psuedo-nationalist reasons why different countries are better (or why the dive, why they play conservative defense, etc).

But when you look at the success of the US Women's team it's very clear that the main thing is investment in building talent. The rest of the world does it for mens soccer (football) because that's what they do. When Title 9 went into effect America put a huge amount of money (relative to other countries) into womens soccer and the US Womens team has been one of the best in the world every since.

So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.

It's that simple.

However, it seems that these two players both play for PSV Eindhoven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi And also these two players both play for Borussia Mönchengladbach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna

Is the article wrong? This is the only claim I bothered to check. Should I assume the rest is wrong, too?

As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great.

Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.

Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.

Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.

Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.

In the US, you have some special factors:

- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.

- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.

- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.

On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.

Conversely, the NWSL is likely the most lucrative league for women besides the WNBA. In both cases, it's a legit pipeline from college to the pros. Women's hockey is similar. So you have a group of players who know each other, have been playing together for a while and were roughly trained the same way. Also, the second best women's soccer team happens to be in their "division".

They can come together as a team better than American men who all went through different training programs from youth.

Cavalry was never that important in the military experiences of Americans since its founding a mere 250 years ago, whereas lots of folks served in the infantry — Civil War through WWII. The US, moreover, is essentially a 20th Century country; infantry, tanks, air forces, etc. is 20th Century warfare; and American football echoes those 20th Century technologies.

The romantic ideal and practical effectiveness of cavalry over many centuries, ending in the 20th Century/WWI, made it much more deeply ingrained in the European (Old World) psyche. Soccer is cavalry, thus Europe and past colonies gravitated towards it.

Requirements to forming a division 1 league, as determined by the ‘US Soccer Professional League Standards’:

- minimum 12 teams (14 by year 3)

- each team’s principal owner has individual net worth of $40M

- 75% of teams located within major metro markets (at least 1M people)

- 15,000 seat stadium (and enclosed)

- teams located in each of the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones

https://www.ussoccer.com/organization-members-directory/pro-...

Sports are artifacts of culture. Although the US does remarkably well in soccer despite soccer not being a mainstay of american culture. The question should be, how come the US does so well in soccer, despite it still being a niche sport (even then mostly for older generations).

Soccer is much more popular with gen-alpha and to an extent gen-z (thank youtube).

A lot of the top national teams have players that play in the premier league or some other european league. The American national team (last i recall, haven't kept up) typically only play in the MLS where even then the foreign players treat it as a last stop before retirement when they do have premier league experience.

iron sharpens iron, competition is what it's all about, year round. I wonder why the premier league didn't expand to the US, Canada and beyond? it has global popularity but with not logistical or technical inhibitions, it still is a europe only (keep in mind, europe is still a bunch of countries, so international) club. There aren't enough matches to make a 1-2 6-8 hour international flights a week that big of a deal (assuming a day of recovery afterwards), and/or matches can be scheduled so that they move to one side of the atlantic after a few weeks and back after a few more instead of lots of back and forth.

I would say the NFL and the NBA dominate US culture, but today, the MLS and NHL are about the same level with younger generations as soccer -- if you include all of soccer as one thing instead of just the MLS.

A football is the default “toy” given to young lads, and you can play anywhere with anyone.

So much so there are custom “no ball games” signs in many neighbourhoods due to noise averse residents getting annoyed.

There are also many supporting elders who try to improve and guide skill development.

The best softball teams were the MBA and law students, who were mostly American.

But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.

Literally: just have a clock the counts down. That alone would reduce confusion but casual consumers who don’t understand the rules.

This isn’t hard.

The real question is: Why isn't soccer more popular in the US?

Soccer is a very wide game. It's easy to understand and easy to start playing. Don't touch the ball with your hands and kick the ball into the goal. It's easy enough that six year olds with coed teams can start playing and have fun. It explains the huge youth participation in the US.

Soccer, however, lacks depth. Games likes baseball and football have deep strategy and specialization that soccer/basketball/hockey just can't match. It's checkers vs chess. You can develop widely different skill sets in these games.

Basketball is soccer/hockey on speed. The games are a progression of incremental advantage. Each goal scored is another adrenaline shot for the fans. It's a long chain of dopamine hits. It allows for momentum shifts.

It's no wonder then that the majority of athletic talent in the US is funneled into one of three sports in the US: football , baseball and basketball.

The big conundrum is: Why is hockey so much more popular than soccer in America? I think it's because it's a condensed arena, faster game play and has lots of aggressive plays. Whatever the answer may be, I think it will prove key in answering why soccer just hasn't caught on professionally in the US.

I don't hate soccer. I'm definitely going to be watching some world cup games. If I had a magic wand, I would implement the promotion/relegation system for every major league sport in the US. Let the owners take a haircut if they have bad teams! I think it's an excellent system which really make the owners have some skin in the game.

I just don't think soccer is compelling enough of a game to draw eyeballs away from the big three.

Yes, it’s possible that it’s a “me” problem.

90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle.

If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.

Why isn't U.S. better at Field hockey, Badminton, Cricket, Ping pong etc.?

Ideally a capitalistic system is supposed to produce the best or close to the best in each category to stay competitive then what gives?

Capitalism produces the "best" in categories where there is a high demand for a product. In the U.S., the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. This is closely entwined with "culture".

This is why the U.S. leads in sports that are tailored for television and massive stadium revenue. Sports that are more nuanced, low-scoring, or lack a domestic TV or the US cultural zeigeist simply cannot compete for the attention span of the American consumer, and by extension, the capital that follows that attention.

I'm from Spain and living in Mexico. Football in these countries is almost like a religion.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-histo...

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. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.

Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.

If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.

Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.

Or we have two other sports that are totally different.

Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.