Young people like game’s cool factor
Americans’ interest in World Cup, Premier League, MLS rivaling that of baseball
Baseball’s All-Star Game took place for the 89th time Tuesday, coming two days after the end of soccer’s World Cup and a week before most NFL teams begin reporting for training camp.
This break in the season, along with the relative quiet across the national sports calendar, usually inspires a series of conversations about what’s wrong with baseball, and this year has been no exception. Alarms are being sounded across the board about attendance (down about 1,500 fans a game off last year’s total), polling that shows fewer than 10% of Americans call baseball their favorite sport and a leaguewide batting average of .247 (lowest since 1968) that has made the game less oriented toward offense and balls in play.
How do you know the problems are real? Serious people affiliated with baseball aren’t writing these issues off as cyclical. Some are even proposing drastic ideas to radically reform the way the game is played (retired MLB pitcher and broadcaster Jim Kaat, for instance, tweeted over the weekend about shortening games to seven innings).
But the real issue with baseball has less to do with the quality of play, number of games or price of tickets. It’s whether an unstoppable generational realignment is taking place in the American culture that is going to lead to soccer replacing baseball in the so-called “big four.”
To be clear, it’s still an open question. But with a wildly successful World Cup just ending and MLS on the rise, it’s not inconceivable that soccer’s popularity is going to grow at a rate to surpass baseball by the time the World Cup comes to the USA in 2026.
Something has changed in America, even if it’s a bit hard to pin down or quantify in a specific metric. You can see it in the social media chatter during a big soccer match, whether it’s the World Cup or English Premier League on a Saturday morning in the fall. You can sense it in the packed pubs and parks over the past month to watch games that didn’t involve a team from the USA. You can feel it in the energy of a city such as downtown Atlanta, the nation’s college football capital, where an MLS team put 72,243 fans in the stadium Sunday and it wasn’t even a surprise.
And while it’s unfair to equate a once-in-four-years energy of an international event such as the World Cup with baseball that grinds away day in, day out over a seven-month season, it would be naive to ignore the potential that soccer holds to disrupt the pro sports landscape that has held firm for decades.
Once derided as too boring for the American sports palate, the theory for years was soccer’s popularity would turn when the generation that grew up playing youth soccer matured into adults. That hasn’t really turned out to be true, nor did the expected boom materialize after the 1994 World Cup and 1998 Women’s World Cup were played on our shores.
Rather, what has truly lifted soccer’s prominence from a viewership standpoint are technology and globalization. Soccer has become the sport of the young and urbane, who tend to live in big, diverse, metropolitan cities and don’t care that the best players in the world are neither American nor play for American teams.
And because the top European leagues are now relatively easy to access on both TV and the Internet, it has become natural for people to build a connection with the recognizable, pop culture stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Lionel Messi even when they play across the Atlantic Ocean.
You’d struggle to find a single player in the baseball All-Star Game besides maybe Bryce Harper who is as wellknown and recognizable among Americans under 40 as any of the top international soccer players.
Beyond that, the two-hour window for games appeals to millennials, who are often reticent to commit to three or four hours for watching baseball or football. And when you combine the MLS and its rapid expansion into booming markets such as Orlando, Florida, Atlanta and Portland, Oregon, with the well-documented popularity of the FIFA video games, you get a sport with a cool factor that appeals to the younger crowd in a way baseball is struggling to connect with.
Again, there hasn’t necessarily been a definitive shift in the U.S. population. Some will point to Fox’s ratings for the World Cup final being down slightly from ABC/ESPN’s four years ago (the France-Croatia final drew 17.3 million viewers) and say there’s been little growth in the appetite to watch a nonU.S. team play. Conversely, last year’s World Series averaged 18.9 million viewers on Fox across seven games.
It’s a fair point. As of today, there are probably more baseball fans in the USA than soccer fans.
Maybe that won’t ever change, much less by 2026.
But with another World Cup behind us, it’s clearer than ever soccer has become part of the mainstream. It’s relevant and hip, two words unlikely to be uttered about the baseball exhibition in Washington on Tuesday night.