Trolley dodgers, factory workers and sports in pre-RATV America
I think the POD would need to be in the late 19th century. The baseball versus cricket rivalry of the 19th century affords some perspective on the problem.
The "baseball descended from cricket" idea, though once published widely and still generally believed, is not accurate. (FWIW I enjoy watching both sports). There was some cross-fertilization; baseball's shortstop, for instance, originally played closer to the plate than other infielders during the mid-19th century (a dead ball era), bearing an uncanny resemblance to the short leg position in cricket. Shortstops moved out to be farther from the plate than other infielders as the ball was modified. They become insurance against blooper hits pulled into play by the predominantly right handed batter and relay throwers after deep outfield hits.
Nonetheless, historians now believe baseball and cricket were siblings that evolved from rounders and related games like stool ball. Rounders survived more completely in baseball and stool ball more completely in cricket. Both games competed for American fans throughout the 19th century, as cricket's originally dominant position declined with inverse proportion to baseball's ascendancy. Amateur athletic clubs often played both but it rapidly became apparent that the urban middle class' loyal attendance at contests would be required for professional clubs to develop a permanent and profitable existence.
It seems that the relatively faster same day *finish* of baseball won out over cricket, where matches took several days. Amateur athletic club fans were drawn from the leisure class, but the masses of the public whose paying attendance was needed to sustain a club didn't have the time to sit through a match. Cricket's professional clubs, then, were confronting an immovable economic wall. Pre-radio, let alone television, working Americans didn't care to join a game during its last third of play, or attend an earlier third and wait for days to learn from the newpaper what happened.
Baseball could therefore deliver crowds significantly larger than cricket. By example, the same driving factor explains why the quiet parlor clavichord was re-engineered into the harpsichord for a chamber concert and then a piano when the middle class rose, willing to flood concert halls (boosting the per performance take home income for artists and concert producers).
Likewise, baseball was more easily approximated than cricket by kids playing stickball in the alleys of urban America. (Today, the ready approximation of playing dynamics that by be achieved simply by hanging a hoop anywhere is one reason so many in the inner city grow up loving basketball over baseball -- and the better athletes among them shoot for the NBA rather than MLB).
Soccer shares the creation and maintenance of a beautiful green space and a game that can be finished in an afternoon. It has both the green space psychological setting and economic scale of baseball. Soccer likewise had the "stickball" quality of being a game whose dynamics could be reproduced in alleyways with an adjustment of scale.
Although the tempos are dramatically different, soccer's overall dynamics are otherwise similar to basketball. Basketball was invented in the 1890s as a form of indoor soccer (a soccer ball was used originally, in fact), specifically to give amateur athletes an indoor game during the winter. It had certainly not achieved any popularity remotely like that it came to enjoy later.
And while it usually lacks the life-changing, bone-crushing series of combat-style injuries served up in each game of American football, fans can satisfy that level of bloodlust in the stands and other off-field venues in ways more direct and presumable more satisfying for that reason. During the first decade of the 20th century, football was just catching on as a university (not a pro) sport, highly controversial due to injuries. (Teddy Roosevelt loved it precisely because it approximated war right down to leaving lifelong invalids among the dozen or so deaths during those years. His frustration over being unable to manufacture a war for that generation of university lads, when he believed every generation needed one, was partly put to rest when he attended his first football game, after which it became his chief ambition to get America involved in European wars whenever possible.)
So why didn't it catch on?
Soccer's relative lack of scoring has been blamed for why Americans have never taken to it as a past-time. Yet cricket is actually a more frenetic play than baseball as batsmen run feverishly back and forth over the pitch, and the scoring piles into hundreds of runs. Americans still went with baseball.
Arguably, the problem may well be the fact that in many soccer matches a 1-0 score seems insurmountable absent from preternatural endeavors by the team staring up that steep slope.
Certainly fundamental changes to the pitcher's mound and the strike zone after 1968's "year of the pitcher" suggests MLB has long recognized it cannot fall into that whoever-chokes-out-one-run wins' net. In the 1990s, MLB did a wink-and-nod to massive PED abuse so the homers would bring the game back after the massive disaffection created by the 1994 strike. (Once the goal was met, MLB mandarins were "shocked -- shocked!" that reports of PED skittle parties were true, although (like Captain Renault) they nonetheless collected their winnings.
Could 19th century / early 20th century changes have brought soccer into vogue in America? America's "second sport" slot was still undecided. I think so, but I'm not even remotely well-versed in what the rules are. (American, you see?)
I do know that rules for soccer / association football were being carefully redrawn throught the mid- to late-19th century, beginning with changes made by Cambridge. What rule changes then, cognizant of the fandom factors such as those discussed above, might have made soccer a more up tempo game while retaining its general look, feel and same afternoon resolution of games?
