Do You Think MLS Will Ever Pass One Of The Big 3 American Sports?

la liga, seria A and La Liga MX have absolutely zero chance of doing so.

I think the odds of the EPL passing the big 3 in America is also highly highly unlikely.

Liga MX is already way more popular than EPL in the USA.

But yes, I do not see them being bigger than MLB, NHL, NBA, NFL or NCAA Basket and Football. (I will leave out NASCAR because they are a different beast, second in popularity only to NFL probably).

not with English speaking Americans.

Even in Mexico, La Liga is more popular there than Liga MX. In the US, it's the EPL, followed by La Liga and Serie A that has the most popularity with soccer fans.

Nope, Cosmo is right, Liga MX is bigger than all other soccer leagues in Mexico and the USA, but is mostly with Spanish speaking people.

Check the numbers, Liga MX gets more money, coverage and ratings than any other league (soccer) but yes in Spanish.

True. Then again what percentages of people that follow Liga MX in Spanish also speak English? I would say a very high %.

So if say 70% of Liga MX followers speak both languages; then maybe even among “English speakers”.

But that would be hard to calculate.

yeah but if La Liga MX was so popular then why isn't FOX putting it on network TV like they are with the EPL?

La Liga MX is popular with Mexicans. I'm sure a large % of them also speak English. I know this is anectdotal but I've ever met anyone that follows La Liga MX and i have quite a few mexican friends and aquantinces.

also here's to the guy that said Team USA basketball was way more popular than the USMNT

2010 FIBA Basketball World Cup - USA vs Turkey final. TV ratings on ESPN? 900k (lol)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_FIBA_World_Championship#TV_ratings

2010 World Cup - USA vs Ghana quarter-final - TV ratings - 14.8 million.
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/20...atched-mens-world-cup-game-ever-in-u-s/55461/

case closed. No one cares about Team USA basketball.

You are going to cite the FIBA World Cup to say that nobody cares about USA Basketball? Nobody ********ing cares about the FIBA "World Cup." Basketball's most important tournament has been, and will always be, the Olympics.

And if anything, USA Basketball suffers from being vastly superior to most of the other countries in the world. It's just not even fair, really.

wow you are a really angry guy

I use the FIBA World Cup because it is a stand alone tournament just like the World Cup. The fact that it gets such poor ratings shows that USA Basketball is not very popular.

Even when using the TV ratings from the Olympics, Team USA Basketball doesn't even come close to the ratings of USMNT during the World Cup.

I'd even argue that the USWNT is a more popular national team than Team USA Basketball.

There are two ways to measure popularity: Quantitatively (TV ratings) and Qualitatively (passion from fans). In both cases USA Basketball loses to USNMT big time. Basketball fans are passionate about their NBA teams not so much TEAM USA.

Fox mundo will be a spanish broadcast network, they probably will have liga mx eventually.

Ratings for liga mx are down the past few years, but i am sure they beat EPL overall ratings most weeks of the season with 1 less game.



Btw i agree the usa soccer nt is way more popular than the basketball nt, ultra is right about the reason, people see basketball like the british, club over country. Nba > national team.


Usasnt is the second most popular nt in the USA.

I thought the highest rated tourney was the NCAAs.

They were discussing the event that is biggest to "Team USA" basketball, not basketball in general.

MLS's biggest problem is that it isn't a top flight league in terms of perceived talent.

All it takes is one soccer prodigy, a young American soccer player who's dominant at the World Cup and playing in MLS. Once he pops out of one of these growing academies--and he will eventually--the attention MLS gets will grow tremendously. Don't know when it will be, but I expect it happens some time in the next decade.

if and when we have an American soccer prodigy it's likely that he will skip MLS altogether and just go to Europe. If he is from a city with an MLS team and academy he may stick around for a couple years. But the goal for top players in the foreseeable future is Europe.

i actually don't think not being a top league is MLS's biggest problem. Being seen as a legitimate league has always been a hurdle. Getting the traditional soccer fan to support the league has always been elusive to MLS.

we need more pro teams throughout our soccer pyramid and need to build soccer culture from the bottom up. If we do the right things then eventually our D1 league will be a top league in the world.

Have you ever met a real NBA fan?
Neither have I.

No it won't. If Neymar was born in LA and signed to CUSA and 17 he would quickly move on. If MLS tried to trap him they'd just loose him to a free transfer. There might be a bump in interest like Freddy or Becks caused but it wouldn't be a game changer. Euro snobs are not going to start following MLS because they found a prodigy. I mean is Kagawa considered a world class prodigy, does it make people want to watch J League? Did it change their fan base domestically?

MLS will always be a step behind because they can never offer their players UEFA Champions League so players will always want to make the step up to Europe, and because MLS can't capture world-wide audiences like Euro super clubs, our TV contracts and sponsors won't ever match and we can never pay as much as they do. One prodigy won't change it. If you had a wave of talent, like dozens and dozens of great young players like the Brazilian league has, then you might get Euro fans to start watching because MLS would be perceived as the place that is developing world class talent. If MLS stumbles onto one player (lets say Freddy ended up being Messi) it would be a circus to watch this kid rip up the league and when he left at 18 or 19 (which we would almost certainly do) all the casual and non-soccer fans would just point to the players loss as proof that MLS sucks.

Uhhh, what? I know a ton of passionate NBA fans.

The answer is it depends. Clearly soccer isn't at the same level as the other sports, but it has the greatest ceiling simply for the fact that soccer is the world's sport and World Cup's impact is much greater than the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Stanley Cup playoffs and the NBA combined.

America is a young country relatively speaking and it tends to be very self absorbed. Just look at the fact that baseball calls it's championship the World Series yet the world isn't involved aside from the foreign born players most of thsoe come from central american countries and islands near the US. Or the fact we call it "soccer" in deference to our "football" which when you think about it football has very little to do with the feet contacting the ball and frankly is an insult to the original football.

We tend to think of ourselves in terms of how good our best teams are within our own country because of arrogance and a lack perspective as to the impact or lack thereof on other countries. We tend to think the Super Bowl is the greatest thing since sliced bread when it pales in comparison to the World Cup.

Most Americans say derogatory things about soccer because America isn't the best at it and isn't close yet to being the best and dominating.

How many French, Italian, English, German, Spanish, etc. born players play baseball in MLB? None that I can think and if they were born there it's usually because they were born there on a miltary base or they left at a very young age.

Globalization will eventually push "soccer" to the forefront. That doesn't mean the MLS doesn't have a lot of work to do.

The NFL 60 years ago was on the verge of collapse. Sure the circumstances are different but eventually we as a country will grow up and get tired of winning our natioanl trophies for our sports leagues and want to win a global club championship. That's why "soccer" has such a big advatage over all the American sports becuase it's already established in most of the rest of the world whereas baseball, basketball, football are not.

Soccer has three top tier leagues some might argue 4; whereas basketball has one top tier league and there's a massive drop off after that, and baseball has one top tier league one league that's the equivalent of comparing the top Danish soccer league v. PL, La liga, or Serie A.

Rel/pro somewhat fits in with the American dream of being able to buy a plot of land build a small field and being able to achieve and be successful and move up. MLS will need to eventually move to the rel/pro model which will also businessmen to buy smallish teams with a chance to move up.

After all who the heck cares about Jacksonvile Cleveland in December if you aren't from either city and you don't have a fantasy team and you aren't gambling on the game, but if that game was key in determining which of those teams stayed in the NFL and which was demoted to the NFL B league interst would be much keener.

As silly as this sounds, one of the reasons the NFL has taken off in popularity in recent years is fantasy football. American football lends itself very well to everything about the worth of a player being measured by statistics. And millions upon millions of people get immersed in the NFL strictly in an attempt to beat their friends in their fantasy football league.

I would probably be more into the fantasy game at MLSSoccer.com if I knew anyone else that played. None of the rest of my friends care anything about soccer.

Gambling is why the NFL (and March Madness) is so huge!

F.F. is gambling for people that do not gamble.

Unless you are like me and plunk down $100 for your league.

Disagree wholeheartedly. The most financially successful pro sports leagues are in the United States--the NFL and MLB--and those are two relatively esoteric sports. MLS's only priority now should be capturing the American soccer market, where the potential fanbase is much higher than any of the EPL, La Liga, Serie A, or Bundesliga.

What will eventually drive talent to the United States is the money being offered. That amount is growing slowly, but it's growing.

As for developing a young talent, I agree. Our first superstars will spend all of a couple years in the United States before they ship out (Demps, Altidore, and Bradley are examples of that). But if they have a successful international tournament during that time, people will tune in to watch them, inevitably boosting MLS's financial standing and lending it legitimacy.

Sigh, so many misconceptions and so much ignorance in your post. On your silly point about what the sport is called in this country, I'll point out that "soccer" is the term used by the majority of the world where English is the first language. When it comes to what to call the sport, the UK is the outlier, not us.

In any event, football, soccer and the various rugby codes are all cousins. It's just an accident of history that decided what name was preferred for each sport in the different English-speaking countries.

This shows your ignorance of the history of sports in this country. Soccer didn't catch on here for a number of reasons, historically. Other sports became more popular. Unsurprisingly, Americans care more about the championship of a widely popular league (the NFL) then they do about the championship of a sport that is still pretty niche in this country,

American soccer fans need to stop with the whining about how other people don't like the sport we enjoy. Seriously, most Americans are, at worst, apathetic about soccer. The anti-soccer yahoos represent a pretty small percentage of one annoying generation (the Baby Boomers). They just tend to be overrepresented in the media.

So what?

This makes it clear how much of a snobbish prat you are. American fans of teams like the Packers, Wolverines, Yankees, Red Wings and Lakers, just to name a few, aren't just killing time following those teams while they wait for soccer to rescue them. American fans are just as devoted to their (non-soccer) teams as any European soccer fan. Soccer certainly has a bright future in the US, but the idea that it is going to sweep away the generations of fan support, culture and history is pretty laughable.

So what?

The Champions league is the highest soccer club competition, players will still want to play that, you are right, players would stay if they get offers from mid to lower table teams, like Dempsey not going to Fulham, but if a player is good and receives an offer from a top team they will go, even if it means a pay cut.

Liga MX pays very well that is why most Mexican players stay there, but players still want to try their luck at the top leagues with the hope of playing in the champions league, if they fail like say Barrera they can always go back to Mexico and make decent bank, but that competitive mentality is always there to try to go to the best competition.

So to your point, yes a high salary CAP would mean not losing players to Norway, Sweden, England and German D2, etc. But “prodigy” players would still go to the best teams in the top 4 leagues. I mean the top teams in the Champions league have payrolls of 100 million plus. Only the NFL can compete with that in terms of total salary (NBA competes in terms of average salary).

I agree with all of this, except I doubt an offer from a top team will ever involve a pay cut.