In 1994, the future of soccer in the United States looked promising. The country had just successfully staged its first World Cup, and the tournament was supposed to be followed by a professional league capable of locking in that momentum. America’s main sports—from football to hockey—were already built around strong domestic leagues and mass audiences. It seemed soccer might follow the same path.
Over the next three decades, its audience grew, participation increased, and the sport became a durable part of American culture. According to one recent survey, it now ranks ahead of baseball among sports fans.
But now, as the United States prepares to host its second World Cup together with Canada and Mexico, the outcome has proved less straightforward than many in the 1990s expected. Soccer has indeed become a major American sport, but it has not coalesced around a single organization, a single league or a single shared audience.
Fans are spread across foreign leagues, national teams and domestic competitions. A generation ago, such fragmentation might have been seen as failure. In America in 2026, this is what success looks like—in a diverse, digital and fragmented sports environment.
When FIFA awarded the United States the right to host the 1994 World Cup, it required U.S. Soccer—the nonprofit organization that oversees the American game from youth leagues to national teams—to create a new professional league. The logic was clear: soccer needed a domestic flagship that could turn interest in the World Cup into a durable fan base.
The league began play in 1996, and the name Major League Soccer itself reflected the scale of its ambition. Thirty years later, MLS has become a permanent part of the American sports calendar.
The league has 30 teams and a major media-rights deal with Apple. These are clear signs of success, but not the only ones. The opening weekend of the season in February was the biggest in MLS history: one match featuring Inter Miami’s Lionel Messi and Los Angeles Football Club’s newly signed Son Heung-min drew 75,673 spectators.
Yet for all its achievements, MLS controls only part of America’s interest in soccer. League commissioner Don Garber has said MLS broadcasts average 120,000 unique viewers. By comparison, the English Premier League finished the season with an average of 535,000 viewers per match in the United States, while the audience for Mexico’s Liga MX, by one estimate, is close to 700,000 viewers per game. That allows it to retain its status as the most popular soccer league in the U.S.
The fragmentation is visible not only on screens, but also in stadiums. For more than a decade, Mexico’s national team has regularly drawn larger crowds in the United States than the U.S. men’s national team, including at international tournaments such as the 2025 CONCACAF Nations League finals. Similar patterns appear with other teams. A recent sold-out match between the United States and South Korea, ESPN noted, looked “like an away game”: most of the 26,500 spectators in New Jersey were supporting South Korea and Son Heung-min.
The same tendency is evident at the 2026 World Cup. Fans of several national teams, especially those playing in cities with large immigrant communities such as Miami, have faced heavy demand and been forced to look for tickets on the secondary market. Yet a few days before the tournament began, plenty of tickets remained available for the U.S. team’s opening match against Paraguay. Paraguay has neither a large local fan base nor a star-studded squad of the sort that lifts demand for matches involving other visiting teams. But the mere availability of tickets for the hosts’ first game still points to comparatively restrained interest in the American team.
This can be called a failure only if soccer in the United States was supposed to develop according to the model of the old American leagues. But it took shape in different conditions from the start. Traditional sports became national institutions in the age of mid-20th-century media monoculture, when audiences clustered around one dominant league.
Soccer began growing after the 1990s in a different environment. Cable television, satellite channels and streaming services gave American fans access to the entire world game. The audience itself also changed: according to Morning Consult, soccer fans in the U.S. are younger and more diverse than the audiences of other major sports leagues.
Many new fans start by watching soccer at the highest level—the English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga and other leading competitions. That matters for the sport’s growth, but such a global window makes it harder to unite the audience around a single domestic league such as MLS. Unlike the NBA, MLS is not the pinnacle of its sport, yet it must compete for attention with the best leagues in the world. The U.S. men’s national team, despite its competitiveness and some strong tournament runs, faces the same struggle for attention.
At the same time, the absence of a single center has not prevented soccer from developing in the United States. On the contrary, a more layered and varied system has emerged. Women’s soccer has built its own durable ecosystem, including a strong domestic professional league. Youth and amateur soccer exist in several formats at once—from pay-to-play academies and recreational leagues to immigrant championships. This system is not always equal or fair, but it has many points of entry, and they continue to expand.
This is not the sports landscape older generations of Americans were used to. There is no simple vertical line from youth level to professional league. Instead, soccer reflects the diversity and habits of a younger audience that chooses for itself what to watch, when to watch and whom to support.
The 2026 World Cup shows precisely that: soccer has become American, but on its own terms.