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I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking.

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.

Yeah, this difference occurred to me while traveling in rural Mexico. To play soccer all you need is a ball. So you can go into the poorest villages that have little in the way in infrastructure and all the kids are playing soccer in the dirt road or a random field, etc. And often enough adults join in because they were once the kids too.

So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly.

One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol.

Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference.

Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.

I'm from Honduras, which is also quite a poor country, and the sport (soccer) is all we do and all everyone talks about. It's a core part of our society and a core part just what one does as a human, so since we are kids we think of always kicking a ball around no matter where you are, even fashioning balls from socks tied together or rubber bands, and we all learn how to control them really well even barefoot, in difficult terrain, in rain, sun, shine, anything. It isn't a structured activity. Coming to the US I realized so many American sports need a ton of setup...lots of expensive equipment, a full squad, a special field (baseball), etc. and not just something you can do easily on the street with your friends. It isn't "lived and breathed" as it is where I'm from, and we have so many incredible players. Unfortunately, we are a poor country so the best players won't become professionals and instead pursue other careers, so our national team isn't great, but I know guys that could easily be pros in Europe if they went down that path
I think you are overlooking the more obvious answer. All the talent gets sucked up by the nfl/nba/mlb.
> Finally, a good European player doesn't necessarily head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 18 or 19.

My guess is that less than 5% of european soccer players ever set a foot in College, at least in the biggest Leagues (UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany). I only know two: Lampard and Iniesta. There might be a few more, but they are oddities.

If anything, a good player and good student usually has to make a choice at 18 years old: "am I good enough to bet my future on being a pro player and delay/abandon the College, or do I give up on being pro and focus on studying?"

The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).

Soccer has major competition in the US.

Because these sports started in America too, America usually dominates them.

The same is basically true for most other sports in the US too, and yet there are still high-level Americans. Certainly baseball (which other countries do still play in a limited fashion), hockey and football. With football we are undisputed world champs for the last 60 years! Joking aside, there is no doubt that high-level NFL players are seriously talented and their whole sport revolves around structured practices and weekly games.

Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.

I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.

I believe most of what you said, but no college varsity player is playing only a few times a week. Even the lowest division of NCAA teams would have practice or matches 5-6 times a week in season.
Despite the fairly similar cultural and financial incentives at play in Europe & South America, France and Spain (Portugal to an extent, as well) pretty much lead the footballing world in terms of elite talent. Their depth is ridiculous.

For France, their sporting renaissance, if we can call it that, started way earlier in the late 1960s with what we'd call "DEI" today: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-...

For Spain, correctly focusing on developing in-game intelligence and skill was key in out-competing stronger & taller teams (at a time when rapidly improving football pitches were proving great for playing positional & possession-based game): A very 1970s Dutch way of playing kick-started by Johan Cruyff in 1990s at Barcelona, and converted into concrete results for the national team by Luis Aragones & Vincente del Bosque in 2000s/2010s: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that...

How proficient a country is at a given sport is derived from the size of the feeder pool. Baring extremely rare exceptions, top talent is strongly correlated with deep feeder pools.

Sports are always cultural: Kids grow up idolizing the stars of their childhood, and those stars are drawn from the sports their parents and community expose them to. In Europe, soccer is the biggest sport, everyone grows up watching soccer on weekends and so the feeder pool (i.e. the pool of kids who are drawn to the game) is much greater than other sports. Deep feeder pool allows the system to filter relentlessly to tease out the best.

In the US, and North America in general, kids grow up watching football, basketball, baseball and hockey. So that's what kids end up playing, and all of those sports have deep feeder pools. Soccer not so much.

The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US.

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.

I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either.

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

Didn't read the post, but the problem is that in most top soccer countries, soccer is the number one sport, light-years ahead of everything else. In the US, several other sports are more popular, which drains the talent pool. Kids grow up immersed in soccer culture in places like Brazil, Argentina, Germany or Spain in a way that simply isn't as common in the US.
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.

The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.
Money.

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
Not American. Don’t live in US. The outside impression I get is that the game simply isn’t one of the kids’ default street sports.
My related question to this was why isn't China or India better at soccer? Given the population sizes and some reasonable talented soccer player probability you would think they would be outsized. Then you have the tiny East European countries that get medals. It's fascinating
In the UK, soccer is a working-class sport, which installs a larger proportional base of enthusiasm among the public (and has done for more than 150 years). In the US soccer is a middle-class distraction from the sports that receive a lot more attention and investment. That compounds.
a country can only be so good at so many sports of this type. Every american playing basketball, or baseball, or american football, or ice hockey, is one not playing football. You have to understand that for many countries, the dream path, the default one, for a very athletic young person who is interested in team sports is soccer, from the age of 6 or younger. The entire structure above that branches outward based on this huge intake of talented children, with vast institutions of professional coaches, academies, and huge amounts of training and game time with other talented people, no matter where in the country they live.

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.

How come Ghana, a third world country with a much smaller population and GDP, and probably less organizational capacity, has eliminated the US twice at the world cup? Granted, the US finally got its revenge, but still...

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.

The most interesting point here is to look at Women's Soccer.

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.

The US isnt better at soccer because our best potential soccer players are playing defensive back or point guard.

It's that simple.

The article at one point says "No two members of the 26-man roster play on the same club team" about the USMNT.

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?

The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer.

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.

It's called Football. Naming something right (like the rest of the world) is first step to getting good at it.
It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent.

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.

I find it good that US is not better at soccer. Soccer or football has gained too much importance in Europe and South America. We have seen it encourage unprecedented levels of gambling, insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football, fan violence inside and outside the stadiums, corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics, and more.
Athletic American men can probably make more money playing another sport. You get perks like (mostly) free college. Paths to the pros are less uniform than the college -> pro pipeline, so even when the US has a generation of 11+ world class players, because they've been trained differently and play much further away from home, they can't come together with just a few weeks of training as easily as, say, a basketball team. Plus, the local competition isn't very good. It's just other middling teams and tiny countries.

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.

I’ll throw in my pet theory. American football is rooted in infantry maneuvers Civil War through WWII. Soccer is closer to cavalry, a Second Millennium European experience.

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.

some good points such as lack of promotion/relegation but ultimately misses the root cause

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-...

Because Americans don't really like the sport, it isn't popular in America, and thus nobody gets their kids to play it, resulting in Americans not really liking the sport, ad infinitum.
I think it's that the US follows a red ocean strategy. They don't compete on saturated markets, they'd rather make their own markets and be in a market of one, like NFL.
why isn't russia, china, india?

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.

I think this comes down to higher competition and practice in Europe.

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.

He asks if it's an MLS problem but doesn't dig into the poor management decisions that persist at the MLS level, and though he does touch on the lack of relegation, and he doesn't touch at all on the US Soccer Federation's consistently poor choices for USMNT head coach. We're presently stuck with a guy who praises the players getting into constant on-field fights and each manager constantly makes nepotistic selections for team slots who are under-performers yet constantly praised, or even worse this year, who seem to be chosen for their unfocused non-game-enhancing aggression. That sort of mis-focus might work if playing in leagues where that is the norm, but world-class players and teams play with technique, and the rough play BS lasts as long as the officials allow it and doesn't win in the long term, which is where you have to aim to win championships. It's arguable if we'd even be in the Cup this time if we weren't hosting, and I'll be surprised if we get out of the group stage this time.
It’s American TV. The free to watch stations can’t show a halftime of 45 minutes without ad breaks. They couldn’t do this when TV was the only big entertainment in the last century and now TV matters less, so that window of time is gone.
Several Factors: 1.Socker does not have pause of the game as a result no add, mean not commercial $$$. Several years ago research show that none of EU socker team are profitable. 2. Boring game. Watching 90 min for maybe 1-0 score
I remember they were not that bad, some years ago. But sports is already heavily covered in the USA: basket ball, american football and so forth. Establishing a new sport is harder in such an environment.
I'm sorry to say I'm glad the US are not better at soccer. Given they already have some of the finest pop artists in movies and songs, it seems to me it's a fair balance
I remember when in grad school, there were two casual sports leagues for the grad students: Softball and soccer.

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

But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.

Because USA has different national sports and it never gave much attention in football like Argentina or even Germany. Still USA has amazing Basketball, with its NBA.
Because of absurd bike-shedding by soccer purists.

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.

After decades of hearing the same valid reasons I've recently begun to think that soccer just pales against alternatives.
That is because you call it "soccer"?
It really just comes down to TV viewership. More people watch other sports so the kids want to play those instead
My problem is I can’t stay interested for long.

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 do I need to age verify to read this?