San Francisco Frontiers - Can World Cup fuel North America's soccer boom?

Visit Miami's Nu Stadium -- one of the roughly dozen Major League Soccer stadiums built across the region in the past decade, and the new home of Lionel Messi -- and the enthusiasm is impossible to miss.

Or attend a sports bar in Los Angeles for an early morning English Premier League kickoff, and it will likely be packed with fans, most with American accents.

Mia Hamm, an icon of the United States women's multiple World Cup-winning team in the 1990s, told AFP she is still amazed at the number of Americans she sees wearing their favorite club's soccer shirts these days, as she travels around the country.

"You didn't see that when I was growing up playing," she recalled.

"It was just the small soccer community... (now) you can go along the street here in Los Angeles, in the country, people know the players."

The numbers bear out Hamm's observations.

When American sports fans are asked to name their favorite sport, "football's quite comfortably in third place," behind only American football and basketball, Daniel Monaghan o research firm Ampere Analysis told AFP.

Soccer has edged ahead of baseball since at least 2021, when the survey began, and the gap widened considerably last year, when 15 percent said soccer and eight percent baseball.

- Cash cow -

The surge in popularity is matched by an explosion in financial value.

FIFA is expected to make a record $11 billion revenue from the 2026 World Cup. But soccer dollars were already on the rise before the cash cow of the world's biggest tournament.

Spending on soccer media rights in America -- including everything from MLS and US national team games to the various European leagues -- also surpasses baseball.

According to Ampere, soccer fans skew wealthier and have a propensity to pay more for sports coverage.

In the domestic MLS, 400,000 fans attended this season's opening weekend, and across the 2024 season its total 12.1 million attendance was second only to the English Premier League worldwide, according to data analytics firm Opta.

The league's transfer fees, though still far short of Europe's top clubs, are starting to reflect that, with MLS clubs splashing $336 million on player signings last year alone.

Some $11 billion has been spent on soccer stadiums and training facilities across North America, although that figure includes giant venues shared with the NFL like Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium

New state-of-the-art, soccer-specific homes for New York City FC, Chicago Fire FC and New England Revolution are opening soon.

- 'Next generation' -

The roots of soccer's rise can arguably be traced back to 1994, when the US last hosted a World Cup.

Back then, football was in its infancy in America, yet it still holds the record for the most attended World Cup to date, with over 3.5 million spectators.

And the deal that granted the global tournament to the US required the country to establish a top-tier domestic league, laying the groundwork for what followed.

Around the same time, the US women's team won both the 1996 Olympics and 1999 World Cup on home soil, in a watershed moment for interest in soccer across all genders.

"A lot of the parents that grew up playing now have kids, and you just see them sharing the love of the game with the next generation," said Hamm.

"There's such access to the game now that we didn't have back then."

Today, US interest in the World Cup is so high that domestic broadcast rights have nearly doubled since 2022, from around $450 million to $870 million, according to Ampere.

"The US is actually the highest paying market for World Cup rights globally," said Monaghan.

F.Garcia--SFF