Has soccer "arrived" in the US to the possible detriment of baseball?

As I write, the US soccer team is receiving a royalty check from D.P. Leitch for exponentially increasing sales of Sunshine Superman. This caused one of my europhile friends to posit that "soccer is now established as a major sport in the US and will soon pass baseball in popularity". After I got done wiping the remains of a wasted beer off of my shirt, I went to work explaining to him why, in the U.S., soccer will always be adored...by fans of flying cars, Esperanto, and the metric system. I'll go out on a limb today and say, "Yes, Virginia, baseball will always be more popular than soccer. In the US, anyway." Here's why:

Let's get the first thing out of the way. I like soccer. I just played soccer this weekend in a pick-up game at a local park with some parents and kids. My son plays. He likes soccer. We have watched non-US soccer together on tv and we enjoyed it. I am not some meathead yahoo who thinks soccer is an international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. No...I am just a plain-old meathead yahoo.

This article is not about a qualitative comparison of the game of soccer and the game of baseball. It is only about why I think soccer will not pass MLB in popularity in anything like a generation, at least. Whether you or I prefer one or the other is irrelevant. The issue posed to me was that the popularity of soccer was poised to surpass that baseball in the US among sports fans. That is a facially ridiculous assertion for the reasons explained below.

There are a couple of ways to try to figure out "popularity" of a sport. Attendance is one way. League revenues are another. There are certainly others. I'm using these two, since I think they are fair. They are measurable. Feel free to suggest other methodologies below in the comments. Clearly, I am not omniscient.

I also start from the obvious point that MLB is more popular in the US than, say, MLS or the Premier League. I think that is fairly safe territory for the time being. Still, the issue needs to be visited to show the magnitude of the gulf that MLS, for instance, would have to cross to surpass MLB. A review of major sports leagues attendance and revenues are in order, then.

ATTENDANCE:

MLB Baseball was watched, in person, by roughly 73,400,000 people in the U.S. in the most-recent full year [1].  The average crowd per game was 30,388.

The top soccer leagues in attendance were (total attendance/per game attendance):

1. The Premier League: 13,500,00 -- 35,600
2. Bundesliga: 13,000,000 -- 42,600
3. La Liga: 11,100,000 -- 29,100
4. Football League Championship: 9,900,000 -- 17,900
5. Serie A: 9,600,000 -- 25,300

In these 5 leagues, 1,998 games were played before about 57,100,000 fans, or 28,579 per game. In countries where soccer is established and where it is the dominant sport, it can, therefore, attain Major Sport Status, or MSS [2] in the US. Can it do so in the US? That is far from clear.

Even if soccer does generate large crowds, the absolute number of fans is unlikely to ever reach MLB's level because soccer matches cannot be played 5, 6, or 7 days each week for 162 game schedules. It seems unlikely that MLS could ever pass MLB in raw numbers of fans at games. Soccer in Europe fairly clearly shows that there is a limit to the number of games that can be played as well as the number of people who can go. An elite league in the US could never have enough teams and games to pass MLB in raw attendance so long as MLB does not fall off the map for some reason.

This segues nicely to the next segment. The NFL cannot pass MLB in attendance, yet it is pretty much unquestionably more popular in the US than baseball. Revenue numbers support this. Perhaps soccer could pull off something similar?

REVENUES:

The big five soccer leagues in Europe just exceeded EUR5,000,000,000.00 in revenues in 2010 for the first time [3].

The NFL's TV contracts alone for 2010 alone are worth nearly $4,000,000,000.00, which ignores merchandising, licensing (video games), ticket sales, radio contracts, seat licenses, and concessions. The percentage of revenues to go to the players in the NFL under the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in 2009 is 57.5% The per team cap in 2009 was about $127,000,000.00 for each of the 32 teams. That means that revenues were likely about $7,000,000,000.00 for the NFL (32 teams times $127,000,000.00 divided by 57.5% = $7,067,826.086.96).

MLB generated $6,100,000,000.00 in 2008 [4], though other versions put that at $6.5 in 2008 and $6.6 in 2009 [5].

MLS revenues were not easy for me to find, but they appear to be in the low hundreds of millions. Perhaps $165,000,000.00 as of 2008, for instance. That's less than the Yankee's payroll. MLS is 50 games down at the All-Star break, by that standard, and that's generous.

All of this..erm...revenue measuring does not really explain whether soccer can, in the US, surpass MLB in popularity. Revenue does not equal popularity, of course, but it is a reasonable proxy in a world of discretionary spending. We're not talking about food, shelter, clothing and taxes, here. These are areas where fans "vote" with their wallets for a product.

WHY MLB WILL RETAIN ITS LEAD OVER SOCCER IN THE US IN THE FUTURE:

The MLB has several advantages over soccer. This is primarily about the "first-mover" advantage. Baseball is already a big part of the sports scene. There are myriad minor leagues, affiliated and unaffiliated. There is townball. Little League. High school and college baseball. You have Field of Dreams, Pride of the Yankees, The Natural [6], Major League, Bull Durham, and the Bad News Bears.

You also have an enormous number of successful, interesting, special-purpose stadia scattered all over the United States. Camden Yards. Fenway [7]. PNC Park. CBP. Soccer will, if ever, take decades to have comparable purpose-built infrastructure. That will not happen overnight. It will likely require huge amounts of private money or public financing, neither of which will occur until there are significant revenue streams flowing into MLS.

MLB has built-in fans. Kids grow up with parents who take them to the games. People have grown up with loyalties to their teams. Rivalries exist. While I tire of it, Yankees/Red Sox has meaning to me. Philadelphia Union/D.C. United (after the PU exists for a little bit) has absolutely no meaning to me. History exists and calls to the fan. MLB has great calls. Joe Carter. Bobby Thompson. Bill Mazeroski. Matt Stairs. Just putting the names in order summons powerful memories.

Vin Sculley. Harry Kalas. Ernie Harwell. Harry Carey. Jack Buck. Can you name a soccer announcer?

The above are some obvious examples of the first mover advantage, folks. Soccer has none of it. It can get it, but the goodwill takes time to acquire. To surpass MLB, soccer will need a lot of drama and excitement. 1 - Nil doesn't really move me, but your mileage may vary. 1 - Nil perfect games are ok by me, so maybe someone likes them in soccer, too.

IT CAN BE (AND HAS BEEN) DONE:

The NFL was a relative upstart, compared to MLB. So were the NBA and the NHL (which remain fringe sports, in all fairness to the NFL, MLB, and NCAA football). TV helped football. David Stern helped the NBA. God help the NHL, because nobody else will.

Soccer supporters often push the "demographics" theory. It goes like this: more kids play soccer than baseball, a fast-growing Hispanic demographic in the US likes soccer, baseball fans are older and will die off, etc. Even if true, soccer has an enormous distance to travel to pass MLB. It will take decades, unless all the people over 40 suddenly die off in the next decade. Fans tend to "age out" of sports and, as they get older, gravitate toward baseball as well [8]. Various analysis, such as this, tends to show MLB fans are older and have higher incomes than fans of other sports (the hockey result in the linked article is interesting, though). NASCAR, while once a serious challenger to the NFL/MLB elite sport level, has fallen off badly since 2005.

THE FUTURE:

MLB could stumble badly, but even with steroids, a few rounds of labor strife, competitive imbalances, fractured and idiotic broadcasting policies, MLB is still drawing huge numbers of fans. Nothing puts fannies in the seats like baseball. MLB exceeded the NFL, the NHL, and the NBA (numbers 2, 3, and 4 in the world in attendance). If you include the Premier League, it takes the 4 biggest non-baseball leagues in the world's top ten to surpass MLB.

Money has already been discussed, but to recapitulate, the top 5 best soccer leagues in the world in soccer-mad countries do not generate as much revenue combined as MLB generates. MLB and the NFL are far and away the most significant sports leagues in the world when it comes to dollars. Combined with the huge numbers of people going to MLB games, it seems unlikely that MLS (which appears to be the most-likely candidate for such a thing) will surpass MLB in attendance or revenues in our lifetimes.

CONCLUSION:

I didn't really get to talk about Esperanto, flying cars, the metric system, or other things (see: "prosperity") that are just around the corner, but soccer as a major sport in the US is still firmly in that camp, and will be for some time. Sorry, soccer fans. It's a nice sport, just not a popular one. That's not a bad thing, either.

[1] The figure is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues. It does include figures for the Pirates and the Orioles, and is therefore subject to downward revision.

[2] "Major Sport Status" is, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, something that I know when I see it.

[3] http://www.arabianbusiness.com/589991-epl-tops-global-league-for-revenues---deloitte

[4] http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20080401&content_id=2479371&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

[5] http://bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4124:mlb-sees-a-record-66-billion-in-revenues-for-2009&catid=30:mlb-news&Itemid=42

[6] Except in Philadelphia where he was finally DFA-ed. Or /DFA'd. Or something. Thank god for whatever it was, anyway: http://www.thegoodphight.com/2010/6/22/1530682/rollins-off-dl-ruiz-on-dl-dobbs

[7] The list of superlatives did not include "well-designed", so Fenway can be included in the "successful" and "interesting" categories. "Interesting" is a fair term for a place with a $100.00 seat with a near fully-obstructed view.

[8] Wish I could find my link for this. I hate "I assert, therefore it is true." Maybe someone friendly can bail me out here.