US market taps in on Latin American football fever
MONTEVIDEO: United States football fans have been enjoying a special treat during the latest international break as Latin America’s heavyweights Brazil, Argentina and Mexico have decamped to the north for a pair of friendlies.
It was an unexpected boost for a country still smarting from its embarrassing failure to qualify for the World Cup in Russia, eliminated from qualifying by minnows Panama.
But with a total of nine friendlies involving Latin American sides over two match days being played in the US, many have asked why there is such a proliferation all of a sudden.
“It’s a question of the market,” Carolina Jaramillo, director at Colombian sports marketing agency Score, told AFP.
“The US is a market that’s absolutely growing. It’s huge, with a very big Hispanic market.”
Some 24 years after hosting the World Cup for the first time and despite winning the right, alongside neighbours Canada and Mexico to deliver the 2026 edition, US football continues to struggle to compete for attention alongside the traditional sports of baseball, basketball and American football. In the United States there is a joke that football “is the sport of the future... and always will be.”
But driven by a large Latin American diaspora, many of whom hail from football- mad homelands, hope remains that ‘the beautiful game’ will one day truly explode.
“Now, with the World Cup in 2026 alongside Canada and Mexico, they know and understand that football is good business,” added Jaramillo.
In a recent Gallup poll, seven percent of Americans listed football as their favourite sport.
That puts it just two percent behind the country’s traditional national pastime, baseball, third on the list behind American football (37) and basketball (11).
In absolute terms, that translates to around 23 million Americans identifying football as their top pick – more than the population of reigning Copa America champions Chile ( 18 million) and seven times more than twice World Cup winners Uruguay’s population.
Alongside the NBA, it’s the sport growing the most amongst 18-34year-olds.
September’s batch of friendlies is one way of trying to exploit the potential of that market.