As a spectator sport, soccer is major league in America

TROY HULL | THE CHARLOTTE POST

Bolstered by the growth of soccer attendance and viewership in emerging markets like Charlotte, the sport trails only football, basketball and baseball in popularity in the United States, according to Gallup, a public polling company.

Soccer is a major spectator sport in the United States.

According to the noted public polling company Gallup, soccer continues to grow in a survey that started in 1937. The beautiful game, as Pele called it, now ranks fourth behind  football, basketball, and baseball.

When the survey started almost 90 years ago, baseball was, by far, the most popular American sport and remained so until football, boosted by the growth of the professional game, claimed top preference in 1972. While American rules football remains by a wide margin the favorite sport, Gallup reports that the 31% who name it as their favorite is the lowest percentage since 2001. 

At the same time, 9% of Americans identify soccer as their preferred sport, the highest Gallup has measured by 2 percentage points. Soccer, which has been an American game since it immigrated with the European influx 150 years ago, is now nearly equal with basketball (11%) and baseball (10%). Hockey follows with 4%. Auto racing and volleyball came in at 2% each. Golf and tennis were named by 1%. 

Of note is that soccer is the second most popular sport (14%) among respondents 35 to 54 years old, ahead of both basketball (12%) and baseball (6%). Football tops that segment at 20%. That age group also had 22% saying they had no favorite.

The growing popularity of soccer has been documented in the attendance by those of all ages at Charlotte FC games, which began with a then single-match MLS record of 74,479 fans against the LA Galaxy at Bank of America Stadium on March 5, 2022. From that first season through the 2025 campaign, the Crown has averaged 34,450 fans per match.

Cultural connections

While it was immigration that brought the game to America and took permanent root here in the mid-1800s, many newcomers, like Lou Gehrig, whose family came from Germany, saw baseball, the American pastime, as a way to truly assimilate.

An article on the Gallup website regarding the survey states, “There are meaningful racial/ethnic differences in the percentages naming football, basketball, and soccer. White adults are more likely to name football, while people of color are more likely to name basketball (largely driven by Black Americans) and soccer (largely driven by Hispanic Americans) as their favorite.”

Play the game, watch the game

The youth soccer boom of the ‘80s and ‘90s never translated into the packed stadiums dreamt of by investors into the original North American Soccer League. Part of that is many youth soccer players are competing or practicing at the same time pro teams are. 

That participation rate has continued to grow and has lifted soccer to being the third most popular participation sport for kids ages 6-17. According to an article on joinstriveon.com using data from the National Youth Sports Parent Survey conducted by the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, soccer came in at 24.1%, behind basketball (41.9%) and the combination of tackle and flag football (26.9%). Baseball was fourth (23.1%).

As those kids have gotten older, their familiarity with soccer has turned many into fans now watching and attending games. High profile national and club team tournaments held in the U.S. has helped grow the audience. 

Breaking barriers

The rise of soccer as an American spectator sport is paralleled by the exponential growth of televised options to watch, boosted by technology that has broken down barriers once held by the major networks and their limited space for programming. 

Up until the past two decades, watching soccer primarily had to be done by actually going to a game. 

Fifty years ago, the only consistent soccer on television in Charlotte was a weekly edited to 60 minutes replay of a German Bundesliga match called Soccer Made in Germany. It aired on WTVI and was a binding gift, both entertainment and educational, to the 30 to 40 boys in the city’s nascent Charlotte Jr. Soccer program.

ABC first brought the World Cup to U.S. screens in 1970 by showing week-old filmed highlights on “Wide World of Sports.” They anthology program showed the 1982 FIFA World Cup final from Spain live for the first time.

Despite growing interest in soccer, NBC broadcast only seven games from the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Four years later, Turner Network Television tripled that to 24 matches from Italy in 1990. During the 1994 World Cup, hosted in the U.S. for the first time, all 52 matches were broadcast, 11 on ABC and 41 on ESPN networks. Full coverage carried over to the tournaments in France1998, and Japan and Korea 2002, Germany 2006, and South Africa 2010, again split between ABC and ESPN networks. 

Fox Sports took over English-language broadcast rights in 2015, while Telemundo (under NBCUniversal) secured Spanish-language rights. The growth of cable bandwidth and streaming has made the game omnipresent.

Simply stated, live and on-demand coverage of professional, collegiate, and other soccer is everywhere now, including the networks of ABC, Apple TV, beIN, CBS, ESPN, Fox, Galavisión, HBO, NBC, Telemundo, TNT, UniMás, and others.

There are more than 100 professional teams across the MLS, USL, NWSL and lower tiers, with thousands of college, high school, and club team matches to attend in person.

The more you know…

Results for the Gallup poll were based on telephone interviews conducted this past August, with a random sample of 1,200 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/714281/football-top-sport-soccer-inching.aspx

To learn more about the history of soccer in the United States, check out the podcast An American Game by Soccertown Media, which is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and other sources.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-american-game/id1826903443

https://open.spotify.com/show/1GV7u8fVus8p8Cof5lqB6c

https://www.youtube.com/@soccertownmedia4123 

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