Soccer in the United States: From Niche Sport to Mainstream ⚽

[music] Hi everybody, my name is Shawna and this is the American English podcast. My goal here is to teach you the English spoken in the United States. Through common expressions, pronunciation tips, and interesting cultural snippets or stories, I hope to keep this fun, useful, and interesting. Let's do it. [music] Hello and welcome back. Today, we're talking about soccer in the United States. Or should I say football? Hmm. Depending on where you're from, that question might sound ridiculous. And most of the world, football is football. End of story. But here in the United States, if you ask someone, if they want to watch football, they're picturing helmets. They're picturing big men with shoulder pads, making touchdowns and tackling each other. If you ask someone to watch soccer, they'll picture a game with two teams, 11 players each, a goal on either side, and each team trying to kick or head the ball into the other team's goal. What you call football, we call soccer. And that got me thinking about how strange that must seem to some people from other countries. As you may know, and I know you know, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is taking place in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Millions of people have traveled to North America for the tournament, and stadiums are packed. I'm sure you've seen the hype on TV, or if you're there. Gosh, I'd love to hear how it is. Yeah, from what I can see, the stadiums are filled with fans wearing their teams jerseys, waiting flags, and they're cheering for their national teams, or whatever team they're rooting for. So, to root for means to support a specific team. So, this year, I'm rooting for Brazil and the United States. And to cheer is that sound we make from the stadium when we're rooting for them. Anyway, I imagine a lot of visitors will arrive wondering why do Americans call it soccer? Why isn't it the most popular sport in the U.S.? And the last one, which Lucas, my Brazilian husband, keeps bringing up, do Americans even care about the World Cup? The short answer is yes, more than ever before, but it wasn't always that way. In today's chat with Shawna episode, I'll answer these questions with a combination of statistics, history, and just my general feeling. I hope you enjoy this. And once again, just take my opinion with a grain of salt. In other words, don't take it too seriously. If you would like to improve your English with me and other English learners, be sure to sign up to the Academy. With every lesson, you'll get in-depth learning material. So, the transcript of vocabulary list, the opportunity to speak and write, it'll help you retain new vocab. You'll find the link in the episode notes or on the website at AmericanEnglishPodcast.com. So right now, we're in Brazil. I arrived with my husband Lucas and my two girls on Friday. And this past week, we've been watching a lot of soccer. It's got me thinking about soccer in the US, soccer here, the fans, how they get ready for games, how they support their team. It's just a lot of comparison. Before we get into all this, I confess I didn't grow up as a huge soccer fan. But I did grow up playing the game. Growing up in California, soccer was a big part of my life. For about seven years, I had practiced twice a week in games every Saturday. During that time, I played most of the positions from goalie or goalkeeper to defender, midfielder, just not in the front, not as a four word, which is also called a striker. Most of the time, I was in the midfield because I love to run. And I would just run back and forth and chase people and try to make plays. And the point is, I'm not unusual. Over the last several decades, soccer has become one of the most popular sports for children in the US. According to the Aspen Institute's State of Play report, it's consistently one of the most played youth sports in the country for both boys and girls. Which is probably why the term soccer mom came into existence. And this is a bit of a tangent, but I find it interesting. A soccer mom is a parent, usually a mother, who spends a lot of time driving her children to practices, games, and tournaments. There were many soccer moms in my suburban neighborhood growing up. And just to give you a visual, if you ever hear someone mention this term, there's a stereotype. She or he drives a minivan walks up to the field with a folding chair, hot coffee and snacks, and is ready to cheer from the sidelines. That's your typical soccer mom. So I have to say, playing soccer is huge among children. But watching it on TV is another thing entirely. Now for much of the 20th century, soccer remained a relatively niche sport in the United States. It was mostly played by immigrant communities. And unlike baseball, football, or basketball, it was just not part of mainstream culture. To give you an idea, the US participated in only six of the 16 world cups in the 1900s. There was actually a 40-year chunk of time, a 40-year break, that the US didn't even appear in the world cup, from 1950 to 1990. Isn't that crazy? So what happened? What brought about the comeback? Some say it was Pelle. Some people say that Pelle brought soccer to the US in the 1970s. The famous Brazilian player did attract huge audiences to stadiums after joining the New York Cosmos. And it directly inspired growth of youth leagues. But 1994 was a turning point. That year, the FIFA World Cup was hosted in the United States. And millions of Americans tuned in. The crowds were enormous. More than 3.5 million people attended the matches. Nearly 69,000 fans showed up for every game. Now it was clear, back then, that soccer had a much bigger following in the United States than many people realized. The tournament success led to the creation of Major League Soccer, M-L-S. That was in 1996. Then shortly afterwards, something else happened. In 1999, the US Women's National Team made the headlines. They had a dramatic World Cup victory where Brandy Chastain made a winning penalty kick and ripped off for shirt. It's an image that's iconic now. She and other members from the team went on to inspire a lot of young soccer players. In fact, for many Americans, their first soccer heroes weren't men at all. For a generation, for my generation growing up in the 90s and 2000s, the most famous soccer player in the country. The country was Mia Hamm, a professional soccer player from the women's team. And to be honest, I don't think any of my guy friends could have named a famous male soccer player. Pretty much because the women's team was making waves. To make waves means to do something that causes a strong reaction, attracts attention, or disrupts the usual way things are done. The U.S. women's national team made waves around the world when they won the 1999 Women's World Cup. Over the next two decades, soccer continued to grow in the U.S. among kids, on TV, and professionally. You guys know who David Beckham is, right? He brought attention to MLS. And more recently, Messi introduced more Americans to the sport. When Beckham joined the LA Galaxy in 2007, he negotiated a contract that gave him the right to buy future MLS teams. Now, Messi's contract with Inter Miami was different, but followed a similar idea. And I have to read this because I. This is not something I'm too familiar with. So reports suggest that his deal included a share of new MLS season pass subscriptions sold through Apple, a partnership arrangement with Adidas, and the possibility of owning a stake in the MLS club after his playing career ends. In other words, Beckham and Messi weren't just players, they had skin in the game. To have skin in the game means to have a personal investment in the success or failure of something, especially a financial one. Beckham wasn't just playing for LA Galaxy. If soccer grew in the U.S., he would benefit from that growth. The same was true for Messi. Rather than simply collecting a salary, he was helping grow the league as a business partner. And this is really recent. So in my head, I'm like, "Why?" Why is this so appealing to these international players? They're simply less pressure in the U.S. In Europe and in a lot of the world. Every match is analyzed by millions of fans and journalists. And if there's a bad performance, it can dominate the headlines. In the U.S., I mean, not a typically very strong soccer country, the expectations are generally lower. The focus is less on proving that they're the best, and they can focus more on growing the sport in general. As my friend Elise says, "So the U.S. is where good soccer players go to die." It's a funny way to put it, but from what I've read, it seems sort of true. And yeah, anyway, the strategy of these two really worked. So Beckham helped transform MLS from a league that nobody really noticed into one that could attract international stars. And then Messi took things to another level. According to a report from 2026, his debut led to a 173% increase in league's cup viewership. And the 2025 MLS cup saw a 97% increase in viewership after Inter Miami won the championship. Right? That's a huge increase. In the past five years, soccer's popularity in North America has grown nearly 11%. Almost one quarter of fans said they've become interested in the sport during that time frame. So were Pele, Beckham, and Messi solely responsible for that growth? No. There was the women's team. There was youth soccer, streaming services, and international leagues. But Beckham helped open the door for this new season of soccer here. And then Messi, I mean, he just accelerated the growth. Lucas likes to say that Americans don't care about soccer. And I see why he thinks that way. We're actually in Brazil right now. And on our first day here, his family came over in their iconic yellow jerseys, blowing horns, and waving Brazilian flags. We were actually given four bright yellow shirts and flags to join in. My first thought was, wow, these Brazilians really care about soccer. At least his family, which I immediately learned was very true. When I brought up historic soccer games at lunch, my brother-in-law started mentioning the highlights of games since the 1970s. Do I think your average American could do this? No, probably not. And it got me thinking about how our perception of the world is based on comparison. Lucas is comparing the US to Brazil. Here are some other things I noticed and that have happened that I think just naturally feed into this sentiment that Americans don't feel as strongly about soccer. This weekend, I showed Lucas a picture of David Beckham and Mick Jagger on Instagram to prove that famous Americans do, in fact, watch soccer. And the response was not what I expected. Both Lucas and his brother panicked. Oh no, is Mick Jagger at the Brazil game? Is Mick Jagger at the stadium where Brazil is going to play? It turns out that among Brazilians, there's a superstition that if Mick Jagger is at a Brazilian game, the team loses. I'm like, what? That is so random. I asked Lucas a sister about it. Her name is Sylvia. It tries to ask her, it's bad luck. Okay. I'm going to watch the first song. They do jogadores. They enter, I can't wait to see it in the club. What is it? They have to put their right foot on the field first. They're left foot, you know, because it's a good look for the game. Okay. So, you can lot of soccer player enters the field with the right foot. What? Yeah. Okay. And what else is there? Right here it says, okay, so many fans wear the exact same jersey for every match. If Brazil loses, that shirt might be retired for the rest of the tournament. It won't wear a shirt again if Brazil loses while you're wearing the shirt. Do you have that? Maybe I, you are this t-shirt in a game that Brazil loses. I don't like this t-shirt, you know. The more. Okay. But there's nothing this is so important in Brazil soccer game. There's the way that player soccer players, soccer player, come and watch out. You can say commemorate commemorate. It's so important. Interesting. I've seen the movement. It's a great thing in our soccer history. You know, because we remember soccer player by the way they commemorate it. No way. Yeah. I can't say that the U.S. has many as of right now. I think traditions and superstitions develop over time. So we're not quite there. In Brazil, I get the impression that people are expected to watch. We're at least expected to know what's going on. Sylvia, Lucas's sister, told me that many companies will send employees home early on game days. That is companies that don't employ essential workers like nurses or doctors. They would have to stay at work, of course. But she also mentioned that in her former city, streets were empty when the game was on. This is just something that I can't really imagine yet in the U.S. to top it off one last story here. Last weekend, we went to a symphony. So. like an orchestra performance at a church nearby. And the pastor said, sorry about the change of the event time, FIFA didn't let me know that the game would be on at, I can't remember, six o'clock. And so the event had actually changed because of the soccer game. So, is that something I can imagine happening in the US? Absolutely not. For the Super Bowl, maybe. The truth is, American football is still king. It's still so popular. The Super Bowl drew around 126 million viewers in 2025. Nothing else comes close to that. 126 million. Roughly 25.8 million viewers in the United States. So way more than your World Series game. So for baseball or NBA final game. So for basketball, let that sink in for a second. People always say that baseball is more popular or basketball is more popular than soccer. And it's just not true in terms of the viewership. And here's what was a little bit hard for me to grasp. Viewership here is bigger than in countries where soccer is super popular. But and this is really important. It's because there's just so many people in the US. 25.8 million viewers is just seven to eight percent of the population. So are Americans as obsessed with soccer as people in Brazil, Argentina, England, or Germany? I'd say no. And this is largely my opinion. Seven to eight percent is not nearly the majority. According to act, the voice of European media in recent World Cup's German viewership was around 30 to 50 percent of the population. Right? So 30 to 50 percent watching in Argentina, 50 to 80 percent of the population. I mean, that percentage actually means a lot if you think about it. Because if 50 percent of a population watches a game, chances are that most people in the country will know what's happening. People talk. And what that means for people in the US right now is that if only one out of 13 people watch the World Cup, chances are you'll talk to a lot of people who won't know anything about it. So are there families wearing red, white, and blue stripe shirts? Cheering the USA on in front of their TVs? Definitely. Especially for those who grew up playing soccer, or have some fan in the family. But it's not everyone. To be honest, I think it'll be a while before my mom and dad and my sister-in-law and my brother and all the girls' cousins come over to watch a game. But I could be wrong. The truth is, I think people love competition here. I think they love games, and I think many people would jump on board. Why do we call it soccer? All right. This is one of the questions I brought up in the beginning. Maybe you're thinking, why did it take so long to get to this? It's funny, the story. And it's ironic, too. Americans did not invent the word. The British did. In the 1800s, Britain had different versions of football. There was rugby football, which allowed players to carry the ball, and association football, which emphasized kicking. Association football was soccer. So to keep the two sports straight, students at British universities started creating nicknames. Rugby football became rugger, and association football became soccer. Association was shortened to a sock, and then turned into soccer. When soccer spread around the world, most countries eventually settled on the name football. The US had a problem, though. By the late 1800s, a different sport had become popular in the US, American football. And since the word football was already taken when soccer came, we just kept the word soccer for soccer, and we left football as American football. The surprising part of the story is, yeah, we did not invent that word. In fact, if you look back on 20th century news from England, you'll see soccer written everywhere. Nowadays, of course, it sounds as if soccer is just an American thing. So soccer may never take over American football, but I have to say soccer just in general is much more popular now than it was when I was a kid. And that brings me to the end. Why did soccer become such a huge part of life in so many countries, but not here? Hmm. Right? Part of its history for generations, people in the US were just deeply invested in baseball, basketball, and American football. And those sports became a part of the country's identity, right? Soccer existed often among immigrant communities, but it wasn't usually front page news. But there were little spikes of interest. And one of the earliest ones I find so fascinating, it was from the World Cup in 1950. And so for part two of this episode, I want to tell that story. I will use it as a canvas to introduce all of the terms and phrases you need to talk about soccer in English. So stay tuned for that episode. It'll be posted shortly. Hope you're having a nice day. And until next time, bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the American English podcast. Remember, it's my goal here to not only help you improve your listening comprehension, but to show you how to speak like someone from the States. If you want to receive the full transcript for this episode, or you just want to support this podcast, make sure to sign up to premium content on AmericanEnglishPodcast.com. Thanks and hope to see you soon.