Post
by GL_Storm » Sun Jan 18, 2026 8:53 pm
From The Economist.
America is now the biggest market for international football
Europeans may scoff, but it’s all about the soccer
Nov 12th 2025
3 min read
By Tom Wainwright, Media editor, The Economist
The last time America hosted a men’s World Cup, in 1994, purists sniffed that it was not a proper footballing country. They had a point. Team USA had only recently ended a four-decade stretch of failing to qualify for the tournament. In an unfortunately symbolic moment broadcast around the world, Diana Ross, singing at the ritzy opening ceremony, took a staged penalty kick and somehow missed.
As America prepares to co-host the competition again in 2026, along with Canada and Mexico, things look different. Its men’s team has improved (though they are still 80-1 outsiders to lift the golden trophy in the summer). Its women’s squad has become the most successful in the world, notching up four World Cup wins in the past 35 years.
The big change, however, has taken place among the fans. Football—all right, soccer—still trails behind American football, basketball and baseball as the country’s fourth-most followed sport, according to surveys by Ampere Analysis, a research firm. But when asked which sport is their absolute favourite, 10% of Americans now say soccer, making it narrowly more popular than the sport sometimes referred to as the national pastime, baseball (see chart).
Market values reflect this growing popularity. Spending on football media rights in America has risen four-fold in the past decade and is now greater than the amount spent on baseball rights, notes Daniel Monaghan of Ampere. He points out that, whereas America’s baseball fans focus on a single league, Major League Baseball, its football fans pay to watch everything from the English Premier League to Spain’s La Liga, driving up the sport’s total value.
MLS remains a dull watch, despite its sprinkling of foreign mega-stars
America has become the biggest foreign market for the four largest European leagues. At the previous World Cup, in 2022, it was the single most valuable territory, accounting for 15% of total rights spending.
The bonanza is part of a broader inflation in the value of sport. The streaming wars have driven up the price of content of all kinds. Sport has become especially precious: as streaming splits audiences into niches, live sport is one of the few things that still attracts the large, concurrent audiences advertisers prize. Some of the world’s richest companies are competing to air these scarce events. Apple has acquired the global rights to America’s Major League Soccer (MLS). Netflix has the domestic rights to the next two women’s World Cups.
Football still struggles in America, though. MLS remains a dull watch, despite its sprinkling of foreign mega-stars such as Lionel Messi, who plays for Inter Miami. At the Club World Cup, which America hosted in 2025, only one American team got beyond the group stage (and was then thrashed 4-0 by Paris Saint-Germain). Without better local teams, football is unlikely to claim the same cherished spot in American culture as home-grown sports. And even then, it might still be a tall order.
World Cup mania may inspire more participation, as it did in 1994. And more live spectacles are on the way. Los Angeles will host more football at the Olympics in 2028. And three years later the women’s World Cup will be held in America and Mexico.
America may still have some catching up to do when playing men’s football. But in watching, it is already world-class.
