News: Recent polls and stats on soccer popularity in the USA

They were not. 42 million watched that one.

 

42 million people watched the US team be figuratively speaking murdered on live TV!

What an accomplishment! /sarcasm

What a great way to inspire future generations of American males to play the sport! /sarcasm

 

The preliminary numbers say 44.9 million watched Mexico/England (Telemundo: 23.2M; Fox: 21.7M).

Final numbers for US/Belgium are not in. Preliminary numbers say about 42M.

 

Final US numbers:

50.1 million for US/Belgium--

 

This may not be the thread for it. But it feels like CONCACAF holds us back. We don't get nearly enough reps against the best competition. I wonder if there's ever any appetite for a "super league" of sorts for international play... even if we'd beg to be invited?

 

That lack of competition isn't down to CONCACAF. It's down to UEFA and CONMEBOL having crowded calendars.

CONMEBOL played 90 World Cup qualifying games to get rid of 3.5 teams.

 

And UEFA really doesn't care one bit about the other confederations. They've changed their Nations League Format to mimic the Champions League format. This leads to even FEWER opportunities for friendlies.

Counterpoint: The USMNT has NEVER won a World Cup Qualifier in Costa Rica or Mexico. The USMNT also routinely struggles during qualifying on the road, and even at home.

 

only Europe and South America have made a World Cup final.

North America, Asia, Africa have never made a final.

When will this change? Who will be the first?

Most likely to break through....

Japan for AFC,
Morocco for CAF

Sadly, no one from Concacaf will make final anytime soon

 

Also our Gold Cup record isn’t hugely impressive given the perpetual home field. No back to back titles since 05/07 is pretty poor even with the C team excuses.

 

It does. One suggestion has been to fold CONMEBOL into CONCACAFs Nations League in some way. NL might be a flexible enough concept that format tweaks could tone down some of the murderous flights that would require. CONMEBOL and CONCACAF both could be playing fewer WCQs due to the expanded tournament. Notably CONMEBOL did not do this last time out, they played 90 games to eliminate only 3 of 10 teams and send one to a playoff. A waste of match fixtures, but I don't know if they want to change it or if they cherish the tradition of the format.

I think what people are arguing is that this is true for the wrong reasons, and that adapting to playing Costa Rica away doesn't do anything to help prepare for a mid-tier UEFA team on neutral ground with a ref from, say, Asia.

 

Whatever happened to the Confederations Cup? I read FIFA replaced that with the Club world cup. Isn't that replacing apples with oranges (more like apples with carrots - two completely different things).

I thought that Confederations Cup in 2009 - let alone the win over Spain - did wonders for that generation's confidence and preparedness going forward.

 

"In March 2019, FIFA confirmed that the tournament would no longer be staged, with its slot replaced by an expansion of the FIFA Club World Cup, as well as the 2021 FIFA Arab Cup, as a prelude to the 2022 FIFA World Cup."

 

61.5 million for the WC Final:

https://bsky.app/profile/stevengoff.bsky.social/post/3mr6uendwtc2c

 

BBC and ITV averaged 18.7% of the UK population (BBC 9.7M, ITV 2.4M), Fox and Telemundo averaged 18% of the US population.

So there you go, soccer is as popular in the USA as the UK, occasionally.

 

Tannenwald comes up with a slightly higher number:

Jonathan Tannenwald @thegoalkeeper

42.5 million on Fox.

23.9 million on Telemundo.

66.4 million total.

For a soccer game in the United States.

(A 1-0 game with 30 minutes of extra time, too.)

 

The first set of numbers are typically an estimate based on the biggest markets, the second set is based on all the market data. One thing we've found in this tournament was that these numbers usually get revised upwards, meaning the smaller markets are actually watching in higher percentages than the big ones.