Ahead of the World Cup, the U.S. is trying to build a soccer economy
Cities, sponsors, and leagues are treating the World Cup like a giant conversion funnel — before soccer has earned big-sport status here
A World Cup is easy to understand in the U. S. It’s a big event, a lucrative event, a chance for cities and companies to sell themselves to a global audience.
But men’s soccer on an ordinary week is where things get murkier. Football owns Sundays (and now Thursdays and playoff Saturdays and holidays). Baseball drifts through summer like weather.
Basketball and hockey have their own seasonal grammar. Men’s soccer — for all its TV rights deals and all its high-profile signings — still doesn’t command that kind of reflexive domestic place. Gallup’s numbers still put soccer well behind football, basketball, and baseball (in that order) as Americans’ favorite sport to watch, and researchers who study the sport’s U.
S. standing keep returning to the same fact: The highest-status version of men’s soccer still lives outside the country’s borders. And yet, ahead of the 2026 World Cup, the U.
Continue to the original source for the full article.