How Does The United States Affect The Growth Of Soccer?

The United States is seen as a dominant global power in many aspects such as politics, culture, and economics, and we see this same level of dominance in its global sports. The United States is “the only country that has four team sports dominating its internal sports culture – baseball, basketball, American football, and ice hockey”, whereas most countries would only have one (Blumberg 232). Despite the U.S. having this much prestige in these athletic pursuits, soccer, the world’s most dominant team sport, has yet to receive the same level of popularity and cultural significance in the U.S. as it does in many parts of the world. Significant interest in soccer didn’t start until 1994 when the United States hosted the Soccer World Cup, an international

When examining the ticket sales of the MLS in the first decade, there has been a positive correlation with the “marquee” or big-name players initially. The article “Determinants of Attendance in Major League Soccer”, by John Charles Bradbury, combines the data from the 1996-2019 seasons and takes an econometric approach by organizing the numbers into the four main categories to address how “team performance, novelty effects, market demographics, and marquee players” influence the attendance of the MLS (Bradbury 53). The MLS didn’t start buying big-name players until 2007 when they created a rule so that they could sign one of the best English players at the time, David Beckham, and they instituted this designated player rule, which “allows teams to exceed the league’s salary cap to sign a limited number of supremely talented or famous players who have opportunities to play in the world’s top-tier soccer leagues” (Bradbury

Without a relegation system, the MLS misses out on the competitiveness and excitement within the known professional football framework, it also risks being overtaken by the USL in the top soccer league spot in the nation. The United Soccer League (USL) is a professional soccer league in the U.S. that functions as the second-tier league below the MLS and it used to include MLS affiliate clubs until 2023, when it cut relations with them. A major change that the USL is in the process of creating is a relegation system by connecting the USL, which was founded in 1986, and “the second-division sanctioned Championship in 2011 and third-division League One in 2019” as stated by Tom Bogert and Jeff Rueter in “USL to vote on adopting promotion, relegation system: Sources”. If the USL can implement this three-division structure, it would be a huge breakthrough in the history of soccer in the U.S. And according to Bogert, “The reality is MLS will destroy USL long-term (on our current