In any case, soccer — as it is called — is immensely popular as a youth sport in the United States.  In my home town right in the middle of the midwest — Friday Night Lights kinda place — there were more children playing soccer than either little league or youth football.    There were enough kids interested in high school soccer that my city had several “traveling teams” of high school students playing soccer independently of school that would travel around and play other hich school teams.

I completely agree that the decline of “pick up games” in the United States is disturbing, but — ten or more years ago — pick-up games were quite common everywhere in the country, even in the big cities.   Games of all types.

I believe that popularity has more to do what you are growing up with. In Germany there a tons of grass spaces in each neighborhood, with or without goal posts, where kids just get together and kick the ball around. No extra gear besides a ball required: drop your jackets on the ground as goal posts and off you go.

Once a game gains a certain level of overall popularity other factors will kick in as social status of players and aspirations of kids to become players etc…

This will make it harder for other sports to gain wide acceptance as we see in the States with soccer.

There’s substantial revenue for TV rights as will. In the UK Sky and the BBC between them paid about more than a billion pounds for three years of English Premiership football coverage.

So possibly it’s more of a cultural thing. I wonder if football isn’t so popular in the US because it’s such a fluid, variable game, compared to US-centric sports? Personally, I find baseball, American football and the like rather dull and one-dimensional to watch. I guess it’s a matter of what you grow up with.

But when everyone around you is in World Cup fever you’re kind of get drawn in. We have our neighbors invited for Friday to watch the Argentina vs. Germany game. For me the highlight is going to be the barbecue

With HDTV you could use some of the extra resolution to display commercials while the game is running. Or you could use all those little breaks after fouls and goals to show one ad and then cut back to the game. I guess if somebody wanted to exploit soccer for commercial purposes there would be ways. But I guess the American public would have to show a little more interest first.

As far as marketing is concerned, football is quite big around here. Of course players are fully draped in ads and so are the sides of the stadium. TV audiences are big enough to make all the beer, car and other companies queue to buy ads and (at least in Germany) football is a main selling point for pay TV (which isn’t big here at all and probably wouldn’t have grown at all if it weren’t for football). So I am sure loads of marketing dribble can be placed in over and around football without problems, even if it is less convenient than in other sports.

In addition, football seems to be ‘national sport’ in many countries. Just not in the U.S. for some reason. (This seems to have happened long ago. Why?) So I suppose it’d be hard to change people’s interests (fanatism, culture, …) to go with a completely different sport.

The standard explanation I have heard about people in the U.S. not liking football is that culturally in the U.S. people prefer things to be objectively justified and will rather go for a game like American football that has numerous breaks and lots of rules if that’s what is needed to make things ‘fair’. In (proper football, people keep talking about beautiful and long moves. They’ll curse the referee if he gets things wrong, but they’re prepared to accept that he can make those decisions.

That’s just what I’ve heard people say. I don’t really care for any variant of football myself. But the topic is very hard to avoid here these days.

Yesterday was the first day without football in weeks! And today is ‘free’ again.