AHC - Soccer as the main U.S. sport

[Mr.J]

With a POD after 1900, is it possible for soccer to outdo baseball, American football and basketball and become the dominant sport in the US as it is in much of the rest of the world?​

Before WWII, the US had a fairly good soccer program - taking third place in the 1930 world Cup - and we even beat England's team in 1950. But declines in European immigration starting in the '20s and the nationwide popularity of baseball pretty much killed the sport AFAIK, with a revival starting in the '90s. How could this change? And how would sharing the world's soccer passion change U.S. society and foreign perceptions of it?​

Interestingly, the only TL I know of that has a different sport dominating the US is TL-191, where baseball is a New England thing and most everybody else, US and CS, plays and follows American football. Actually, I don't find this very plausible - around the turn of the century, football was a very elite sport (for the same reasons as skiing - the average person couldn't afford that high a risk of injury), and I think that in TL-191's more class-conscious US, it would fail to become a national pasttime. Maybe it could happen in the CSA, I don't know.​

 

[Anaxagoras]

Sure. Just wait twenty years IOTL.

 

[Mr.J]

Sure. Just wait twenty years IOTL.

Well, maybe, but I want to see a way for soccer to be the main U.S. sport in the mid-to-late 20th century, say from the 1970s onward at the latest.

 

[crackpot]

Sure. Just wait twenty years IOTL.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Baseball is quite popular in Latin America. Soccer may be more popular in Mexico, but baseball is close behind. In places like Cuba and the Dominican Republic baseball is supreme.

 

[Johnrankins]

Sure. Just wait twenty years IOTL.

It MIGHT beat out basketball in 20 years but I very much doubt baseball and much more so football.

 

[Know Nothing]

My view is that basketball has the best prospect to overtake the NFL in the US in the near future. If anything will knock the NFL down from its pedestal, it's this health crisis. Baseball is declining slowly. Hockey is limited by weather.

Soccer has potential, the problem from an American perspective is how you reconcile the exploding interest in the major European clubs amongst the all-important 18-29 demographic with the mid-level status of MLS.

 

[el grapadura]

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Baseball is quite popular in Latin America. Soccer may be more popular in Mexico, but baseball is close behind. In places like Cuba and the Dominican Republic baseball is supreme.

What do you count as Latin America?

Cuba, Dominican Republic, and probably Venezuela are pretty much the big exceptions (even though soccer's become much more prominent in Venezuela over the last two decades), in South and Central America soccer is very much the king.

The claim about baseball being close behind in soccer I find very difficult to believe, last year 30,000 people would turn up in Mexico to see a game between the under-17 teams between the likes of New Zealand and Uzbekistan during the U17 World Cup. Over 100,000 turned up to watch the final of that tournament (the final did feature Mexico though), and let me reiterate - this was for games between kids of 17 years of age and younger. Do you seriously think that baseball could draw such crowds, even for just a one-off game?

 

[d32123]

Baseball is declining slowly. .

It's only declining among intercity youth, but MLB is trying to counteract that. Prior to the recession, total attendance records were consistently being broken. If anything, baseball is on the rise around the world, just like organized sports in general as more people get the leisure time necessary to become athletes.

 

[Mike Stearns]

My view is that basketball has the best prospect to overtake the NFL in the US in the near future. If anything will knock the NFL down from its pedestal, it's this health crisis.

Some people are actually talking about banning football....

 

[Johnrankins]

Some people are actually talking about banning football....

The chances of that happening are zero. Football is far too popular and any politician dumb enough to suggest will be voted out of office. The most that will happen is some rule changes.

 

[Enigmajones]

Sure. Just wait twenty years IOTL.

Thats not gonna happen. A main sport is very possible. The main sport is impossible, barring the outlawing of Football, Basketball and Baseball. At this point, the MLS has trouble filling out each 20,000 seat stadium. When they can pack 80,000 a game into a stadium no problem for every game, maybe we can discuss it being the main sport.

Also, we had a thread about this, like a day ago.

 

[MattII]

I wonder, is there any way of making Rugby Union the major American form of Rugby as opposed to American Football?

 

[jkay]

You soccer fanatics are annoyingly persistent. How does changing century change the ASBhood? Cut-and-pasting from the other thread, of course, yay cut-and-paste.

It's so ASB, so ASB; it's too BORING on TV for most. Even if you ASB out the REAL football, Anericanized by adding a forward pass by none other than our site's fave TR, soccer would still lose to basketball and baseball.

Do remember, also that we have more choices in good sports, as I pointed out in my comment. I love set piece strategy like football so much that, and am, yes, willing to even live with an amazingly low playtime %age. Others like fast basketball. Others like baseball, though it's been getting slower and has long been too slow for me.

Football has an even clearer path forward than when injuries inspired TR to add the forward pass and some other things. Penalties need to go up for nasty bonks (already happened) and the League needs to add rules to make nastily injured, especially head injured players wait before returning. Enigmajones is right - it's ASBland for it to be banned.

 

[el grapadura]

e.

It's so ASB, so ASB; it's too BORING on TV for most. Even if you ASB out the REAL football, Anericanized by adding a forward pass by none other than our site's fave TR, soccer would still lose to basketball and baseball.

Well, clearly it's not too boring on TV, since it's the most watched sport in the world.

The reasons why soccer isn't as big in the US than in the rest of the world are complex and won't get into them now, but one problem that the MLS has in comparison to the big 4 leagues in the US (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) has currently is that the latter are clearly the best leagues in the world in their respective sports (NFL is maybe the only professional league in the world in American football?), while the MLS isn't anywhere near that level. And as long such a situation persists (and I can't see it changing in my lifetime), MLS will struggle to gain acceptance in the US on par with the other 4 leagues.

 

[graymouser]

Teddy Roosevelt saved American football. The early game was so violent and deadly that it needed rules changes to make it liveable for the college students who were playing it. So the first POD is to make that whole event not happen - and the game is clamped-down upon and winds up ostracized from the colleges that had been its main incubators IOTL.

After that, maybe you have a series of scandals on the level of the "Black Sox" scandal over time take down the prestige of baseball. It's hit harder by the Depression and never really recovers when the country does. With baseball more and more disgraced, the American Soccer League does better and better throughout the '20s and survives past 1932. Soccer slowly gains traction, and after World War II becomes a major American sport. In the postwar suburbanization, broad fields become soccer pitches for children around the country and the National Soccer League is formed, eventually merging with the ASL into a "Major League" type of formation much like the AL/NL in baseball.

I figure you'd wind up with a much-diminished baseball as a minor sport, soccer as the majority sport, no American football, and basketball taking a fairly similar trajectory to what it has IOTL. Maybe some aggressive rugby but only at the level of, say, hockey IOTL.

 

[Mr.J]

I'm sorry, I didn't know about the previous threads, and I'm really not much of a soccer fanatic. I was just thinking about how our different national sport relates to "American Exceptionalism" and how things would have been different if soccer had been the "national pasttime" in the second half of the 20th century. Cold War showdowns at the World Cup, different slang (maybe the "bases" metaphor for sex is a weird New England thing that the rest of the country doesn't really get), epic US vs. Brazil matches that take on a political context as Brazil challenges the US for leadership of the Americas... I just think it's an interesting idea.

 

[Mr.J]

Teddy Roosevelt saved American football. The early game was so violent and deadly that it needed rules changes to make it liveable for the college students who were playing it. So the first POD is to make that whole event not happen - and the game is clamped-down upon and winds up ostracized from the colleges that had been its main incubators IOTL.

After that, maybe you have a series of scandals on the level of the "Black Sox" scandal over time take down the prestige of baseball. It's hit harder by the Depression and never really recovers when the country does. With baseball more and more disgraced, the American Soccer League does better and better throughout the '20s and survives past 1932. Soccer slowly gains traction, and after World War II becomes a major American sport. In the postwar suburbanization, broad fields become soccer pitches for children around the country and the National Soccer League is formed, eventually merging with the ASL into a "Major League" type of formation much like the AL/NL in baseball.

I figure you'd wind up with a much-diminished baseball as a minor sport, soccer as the majority sport, no American football, and basketball taking a fairly similar trajectory to what it has IOTL. Maybe some aggressive rugby but only at the level of, say, hockey IOTL.

Makes sense to me. I wonder if a failed revolution in Russia would change things as well: immigration from Eastern Europe continues at the levels of the first decade of the 20th century till the *Depression, as fears of radical leftists aren't as strong and the nativist immigration restrictions of the '20s are never imposed. This continuing flow of soccer players enables the sport to be the leading sport in major U.S. industrial centers, while baseball continues to dominate in places with less immigration. Sort of a "Soccer Belt" filling much of the Rust Belt OTL.

 

[Enigmajones]

You soccer fanatics are annoyingly persistent. How does changing century change the ASBhood? Cut-and-pasting from the other thread, of course, yay cut-and-paste.

It's so ASB, so ASB; it's too BORING on TV for most. Even if you ASB out the REAL football, Anericanized by adding a forward pas
s by none other than our site's fave TR, soccer would still lose to basketball and baseball.

Do remember, also that we have more choices in good sports, as I pointed out in my comment. I love set piece strategy like football so much that, and am, yes, willing to even live with an amazingly low playtime %age. Others like fast basketball. Others like baseball, though it's been getting slower and has long been too slow for me.

Football has an even clearer path forward than when injuries inspired TR to add the forward pass and some other things. Penalties need to go up for nasty bonks (already happened) and the League needs to add rules to make nastily injured, especially head injured players wait before returning. Enigmajones is right - it's ASBland for it to be banned.

Please don't include me in that argument. I agree with you, but opinion isn't gonna win. So we gotta use logic. IOTL, soccer had already been introduced and was played quite consistently from the 1880's into the late 1960's before it ever gained a wide enough audience to support a league above amateur (Not counting the Soccer League propped up by the NL in the 1880's), and even then the sport had to be twisted to American viewing audiences. And even then the sport wouldn't last thanks to a lack of competition, over expansion and over saturation of the market. So it does make it an understandable position that many Americans take, that Soccer simply doesn't stick. In every other country Soccer has proven to be like crack, one hit and their hooked. But not America. Now one possible reason could be cultural Anglophobia, unlikely given American attitudes about British culture. It could be plain old xenophobia, an easy answer. Or it could be that although the sport was popular with the immigrants who brought the game with them, the American people, for whatever reason, simply never found it appealing. Oddly enough, the sport from England most likely to become a major American sport is Cricket. Simply allow America to join the ICC and Baseball becomes a secondary sport isolated to the Atlantic Northeast.

Also edit: To the questions about Rugby, the American game developed from similar roots, but the Harvard game had already gained prominence amongst Collegiate sports by the time Rugby finished sorting itself out in Britain.

 

[Flocculencio]

With a POD after 1900, is it possible for soccer to outdo baseball, American football and basketball and become the dominant sport in the US as it is in much of the rest of the world?​

Before WWII, the US had a fairly good soccer program - taking third place in the 1930 world Cup - and we even beat England's team in 1950. But declines in European immigration starting in the '20s and the nationwide popularity of baseball pretty much killed the sport AFAIK, with a revival starting in the '90s. How could this change? And how would sharing the world's soccer passion change U.S. society and foreign perceptions of it?​

Interestingly, the only TL I know of that has a different sport dominating the US is TL-191, where baseball is a New England thing and most everybody else, US and CS, plays and follows American football. Actually, I don't find this very plausible - around the turn of the century, football was a very elite sport (for the same reasons as skiing - the average person couldn't afford that high a risk of injury), and I think that in TL-191's more class-conscious US, it would fail to become a national pasttime. Maybe it could happen in the CSA, I don't know.​

Get it taken up as a major sport in the Ivy League in the first decade of the 20th C. It spreads to other universities, touted as a more gentlemanly alternative to the violence of gridiron and you have a college league in the making.

 

[Mr.J]

Oddly enough, the sport from England most likely to become a major American sport is Cricket. Simply allow America to join the ICC and Baseball becomes a secondary sport isolated to the Atlantic Northeast.

What's your reasoning there? I'll admit that if we'd been allowed to join the Imperial Cricket Conference, it might have kept the sport alive in Philadelphia, but I don't really see how it would have spread from there. I mean, OTL cricket is largely seen in the US as "weird, slower baseball", and there are few people who would consider baseball a quick game.

I do have to admit, the long-run cultural affects of this might be very interesting. I wonder if it would create closer Anglo-American cooperation, maybe even change the Suez Crisis.