A nice idea, but also consider that of all the established soccer playing nations, Brazil has over double the population of the second largest Germany, who coincidentally are the second most successful. A pop. of 175 million does give them a slight advantage over the bulk of the other 'large' countries in the 40 million-ish bracket.
Which is what I've been trying to say for a long time. Among basketball players, for example, only point guards and some shooting guards would be potentially decent soccer players.
When really good athletes who understand that they will never be over 6' decide to stick with soccer (either because they love it or because they realize their prospects of being a professional basketball or football player are limited), thereby increasing our talent pool to be the size of Germany, then we will start to really suceed. There are a lot more options in the US. Football and baseball do not really exist in Brazil & Germany. So the size of the country is not quite as important as the size of the soccer playing population. Otherwise, China and India would be much better.
Re: African-Americans & Soccer I think Fonsos is right about the race of sports 'heros' being less important than their 'heroic' quality. But race does matter. I think that any of us, no matter what our race, need to see that we are accepted, and if the majority of those playing are of one race and don't look like us, we need to see that people like us are also participants and can succeed when we are in a minority situation. So African-American and Latino-American players in MLS do signal it is open to those groups just as the influx of European players into the NBA will inspire European-American kids to believe that, indeed, they can, after all, jump. I'd never thought about this, and my kids, my wife and I started getting involved in suburban youth soccer about twenty years ago. Looking at our family experience, football was out due to the Neandertal approach that the parent-coaches took to the game, baseball lost with our kids because they found it boring when compared to the constant action they experienced in soccer. I could never figure out why our kids weren't interested in basketball (the sport of my youth), but I didn't push it because we wanted (other than football and it's troglodite coaches) the choice to be our kids'. Guesses about why soccer: (a) it wasn't an established sport 20 years ago, so there wasn't the perceived 'experience' barrier to parent involvement that there were in the others. So many, like my wife and I, got sucked into administrative, coaching (my wife) and reffing (me) activities in a sport we'd hardly been aware of. (b) For little kids getting involved in sports it is a lot more fun to play cluster ball than standing around waiting for your turn at bat or for the ball to come to you. (c) It is seen by parents as safer than football. (d) Once established in the suburbs it became the advertising media 'darling' (notice the perfunctory soccer ball and kid soccer players in so many ads), thus reinforcing it as a middle class suburban sport. But these are just guesses. I imagine that the same question could be asked about any sport. None started because of the existance of professional leagues and heros. Maybe the life cycle is kids playing, more and more kids playing, developing both experienced players who can coach younger ones and the opportunity to make money supplying the sport with equipment and coaching, and finally bulding a big enough base to develop higher level teams, which eventually develop into professional leagues which then have a reason to pour resources into youth development. Maybe...
Only if you define "established" to ignore countries like Russia, Nigeria, and Mexico. I can't think of any rational basis for doing that.
How about saying major contenders instead? Russia, Nigeria, and Mexico are not realistic World Cup contenders (though I believe Mexico will be within the next 20 years with the MFL's rapid improvement and with more and more Mexicans also testing the waters abroad, not to mention the increasing amount of money being poured into soccer). Of the countries with significant resources dedicated to soccer for 20 years or more (the oldest players in any national team were teenagers 20 years ago), Brazil and Germany are the two most populous.
If by we you mean slave owners then you would be correct. Mullato went the way of the term "colored people" Bi-racial or even mixed are much more appropiate terms.