https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/news/turf-a-winner-for-angel-in-new-zealand is titled "Turf a winner for Angel in New Zealand." Former Red Bull and now FIFA Legend Juan Pablo Angel went to the opening of two turf fields in Dunedin, New Zealand. Here a question and answer with what FIFA said in bold: "There are many sports played in New Zealand, did you get a sense of the challenges that brings? Right now there are a few sports that are ahead of football. But it is like the United States where people have access to many sports but that hasn’t stopped the growth of football. So the market is there, but the challenge is to make it accessible to more people. There is massive interest in young boys and girls to play football. So the challenge is probably in other areas. [The challenges are] in development programmes, getting television to show the sport, and for involving the private sector involved to help grow the sport. But the interest and market is definitely there for the sport to grow further."
The final frontier for association football to solidify its place in the local culture is for sure New Zealand, Australia and Canada with us in the U.S.A. Perhaps some of the Middle Asian nations like Pakistan and or India.
Asia has many national teams way below World Cup level in high-population countries like China PR, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Philippines, and Vietnam (who is off to a good start in World Cup Qualifying). All of them have a higher population than England, Italy, Spain, France, Colombia, and Argentina.
It's worth noting that soccer is a secondary sport in almost every Asian country east of Iran. South Asia: cricket is overwhelmingly the dominant sport, soccer has only recently overtaken field hockey as #2. Philippines: second to basketball. China and most of SE Asia: all team sports trail behind individual sports, especially racket sports. Soccer has also only recently caught up to basketball in China. Note China's overwhelming dominance in the table tennis world and Indonesia's similar dominance in badminton. In China and India, soccer is still very much a regional sport to this day. Four provinces in northeastern China, with 10% of the national population, produce half of the domestic players in the CSL. (Before 2000, most of the professional clubs were located there too.) India is even more regionally concentrated: three states in northeastern India, with less than 5% of the national population, produce half of the Indian players in the ISL and I-League.
We are being compared to New Zealand and Asia as a developing soccer country. Not promising for the future.
And, TBH, the comparison is apt in some ways because soccer is historically a secondary sport here as well as in New Zealand and in much of Asia. Both here and there, major obstacles to national team success include limited infrastructure and limited institutional knowledge due to the game not being widely popular until recently.