This author says U.S. is trying to 'conquer' soccer. Not all global fans are happy about it

The 2026 FIFA World Cup officially gets underway two weeks from today, as Mexico and South Korea face off in Mexico City.

This year’s tournament is being co-hosted by the U.S, Mexico and Canada; Team USA kicks off its first game on June 12 against Paraguay at SoFi Stadium in LA.

The runup to the World Cup has been marked by some controversies and criticisms — from the price of tickets, transportation and parking to the first-ever final match halftime show to geopolitical tensions.

It’s against that backdrop that Andrés Martinez stopped by the studio recently. He’s a professor of practice at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and co-director of the Great Game Lab at ASU.

He’s also the author of the book "Great Game: A Tale of Two Footballs and America’s Quest to Conquer Global Sport." The conversation started with a question he’s likely been asked a zillion times before — why isn’t soccer as popular in this country as it is pretty much everywhere else on Earth?

Full conversation

ANDRÉS MARTINEZ: Well, that was the question that befuddled me when I first came to the U.S. when I was 15. I had — I was born and raised in Mexico, but in a very American household. My, my mom was a gringa from Dallas, Texas, who went down to Mexico City to teach at the American school. I think she thought it would be a, a lark, a great adventure for a year or two, but she met my Mexican dad. And one thing led to another. So I, I was raised in Mexico in a very — I was very fortunate to be in a bilingual, bicultural household.

But anyways, I come to the States at the age of 15 in the ’80s, not thinking I was going to have a wrenching adaptation, you know, challenge of going to a new country because it was my other country. The one way in which I did feel like I had been dropped on a different planet or behind some sporting iron curtain was when it came to sport. Because suddenly I, I was cut off from this global culture that kids in Mexico shared with kids in Nigeria and Germany and Korea. And that was very strange to me and, and surprising because I thought, well, isn’t the U.S. supposed to be the center of the universe, the, the hub of global popular culture?

And of course, I didn’t realize this when I was 15, the fact that if you go back in our history, something that, you know, I now write about and study, we very consciously as a nation uncoupled ourselves from the rest of the sort of sporting universe in the late 19th century to develop our own homegrown games, right?

And so, you know, fast forward a century from that period and I’m arriving in this country that proclaims the winners of our domestic leagues world champions. Now, what I find exciting is that this is changing rapidly. And obviously right now, we’re in a completely different place in terms of our relationship with the world’s default sport. And we are now a proper soccer nation in a way that we weren’t before then.

BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting you say that because for so long, people have said, you know, all these kids play youth soccer and yet we aren’t really producing, you know, great international soccer players. And that’s obviously changing with American players playing both in this country in MLS and also in, you know, the Premier League and and other leagues in other countries.

But it’s interesting to hear you say that we are now sort of a proper soccer nation because when you look at the results — take the U.S. women’s national team out of the equation —when you look at the U.S. men’s national team, the results haven’t really been there.

MARTINEZ: Well, it’s funny when you, when we say I mean, this, this idea that we were — soccer was always going to be the next big thing, and when are we going to close this gap between youth participation and a following among adults and performance at the pro level, kind of reminds me of the old Kissinger joke about Brazil, right? "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be." And people always have had that attitude about soccer.

But I, you know, I think you could look at the glass half-full or half-empty. I would — I push — I would push back a little bit at saying the results aren’t there because again, when I first came to the States, this period I’m talking about in the 1980s, the United States had not been to a World Cup since 1950. We were absent for 40 years. We could not qualify to play in a World Cup.

BRODIE: That’s — which is obviously different now.

MARTINEZ: And, and certainly if you’re, again, I grew up in Mexico, I still root for my ... when, you know, the U.S. plays Mexico. And if you’re sitting in Mexico, boy, you notice the difference in terms of how far the U.S. has come, right? It’s become one of the most heated rivalries in the world. It’s a very exciting regional rivalry.

And so recently, the U.S. is a, is a sort of middle power in men’s soccer. It’s not as dominant as it is on the women’s side or as Americans are accustomed to in many of the sports. But when you look at the, the rise of women’s soccer, I think that is one of the factors that changed all of our culture’s relationship to the sport.

BRODIE: Well, because the U.S. women’s team has been dominant on the world stage for many, many years now.

MARTINEZ: Yeah, and and I think that’s an — it’s an underappreciated story, the extent to which women in this country, you know, girls and women who picked up the game of post-high — the passage of Title IX in the early ’70s, really naturalized the game American. And the other thing that kind of made the reconciliation of the U.S. and the world sport inevitable is just sort of globalization at a more top-down corporate level.

BRODIE: Well, so I could see that as potentially being a double-edged sword in the sense that, yes, it’s bringing, you know, this behemoth country, the United States, into sort of the world community of of soccer/football and encouraging Americans to play football and to stay playing football soccer after, you know, youth leagues and everything.

But I could also see, you know, folks in other countries thinking, "Well, you know, here we go, you know, American companies just commercializing and ruining soccer like they’ve done with everything else."

MARTINEZ: It is, it is a bit of a careful what you wish for. I mean, because I think people around the world for a long time have thought one of the things that strikes us as odd about Americans is that they don’t seem to, you know, want to play the same game that we’re playing, and wouldn’t it be great if they did? And yet, now that we are, yes, there’s definitely American influence is spreading. In my — the subtitle that I referred to a little bit provocatively is, "our quest to conquer global sport."

This is the first year, for example, that a majority of clubs in the English Premier League are U.S.-owned. So there’s — that investment is welcome. Those organizations bring a high level of professionalism to a lot of what they do, but there’s also consternation, you know, among fans who like the traditions of the game and they, they worry, what does this mean?

BRODIE: In the world of international soccer, is it considered a good thing, is it desirable for the U.S. to be competitive in soccer? You know, you hear a lot of folks sort of quietly anyway in the NBA say, you know, it’s good for the league if the Lakers and the Celtics are good. You know, it’s good for baseball like if the Yankees and the Dodgers are good.

Is it considered good for international soccer when the United States is competitive?

MARTINEZ: It it depends a little bit who you who you’re asking, right? If you’re asking Gianni Infantino, who runs FIFA, it’s awesome, right? Like, he’s going to make more money out of a World Cup in the United States, even at a time when, you know, we could still have these debates about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. Like, we’re not that into it yet compared to a lot of other countries, although we’ve come a long way, and it’s still going to be — it’s still the most profitable market for FIFA.

You know, it’s funny, 26 million people watched the Qatar final on U.S. television, the showdown between Mbappé and Messi in 2022. That was more people than watched any of the World Series games that year or any of the NBA finals. Obviously a drop in the bucket compared to the Super Bowl domestically.

And yet there were no Americans on the field. It’s kind of remarkable. And so there’s still so much upside. So I think it’s going to be good for the game from the from a commercial perspective.

You know, I think FIFA’s always had this — it’s always been a bit of a riddle in the sense that it is by far, I call it the the world’s default sport. It is the most popular sport. But even when you say it’s the most popular, I feel like that’s selling it short. And yet, it has not been particularly popular historically in the three largest nations on Earth by population. So it is a bit of a, you know, there’s still so much growth in these markets.

But I think, you know, if you’re a traditional fan of Italy, Brazil, England, how are you going to feel when the United States starts winning tournaments on the men’s side as they have on the women’s side? That that that might be a bit of a careful what you wish for.

BRODIE: Let's return now to my conversation with Andres Martinez, co-director of the Great Game Lab at ASU and author of the book, “Great Game: A Tale of Two Footballs and America's Quest to Conquer Global Sport.” The World Cup starts two weeks from today, and I asked what a successful World Cup in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada would look like to him.

MARTINEZ: Well, I have one answer as a fan of Mexico, but let me be less parochial.

BRODIE: I should point out you're wearing your Mexico jersey two weeks ahead.

MARTINEZ: Yes, I brought my Mexican jersey, because I know it would look great on radio. But being less parochial than that, I mean we could talk a lot about what success looks like from the sport and how the games unfold.

But I think when you zoom back, a more interesting question is: Is this World Cup going to be the conversation across the U.S. this summer, or is it going to be still something that has a bit of a niche following? Where it's going to be massive in terms of the sold-out stadiums and people in sports bars and fans of the sport and people who have traveled — that's a given. But is it going to go a step beyond?

We have this fellow at the Great Game Lab. He's actually a professor emeritus at Michigan, who's one of my kind of idols in this space of writing about sport and society. He's a political scientist, Andrei Markovits.

And he wrote a book called “Offside” that looks at exceptionalism and American exceptionalism and soccer. He wrote this in 2000, 2001. And he talked about certain sports that reach the level of hegemonic culture. A lot of us could play pool or go bowling, but a sport that becomes part of the hegemonic culture is a sport that we're all kind of expected to follow, even if informally.

And soccer is like one half-step behind certainly the NBA, our three big homegrown sports. And I think this World Cup will be a moment to take stock about whether the whole country really kind of rallies behind this thing and is following it. And if you're in Germany or Spain or Brazil — or even in our neighbors in Mexico — and a World Cup is going on, there's no missing it.

And is that going to be the feeling traveling around the U.S. this summer? It's kind of an open question in my mind.

BRODIE: So, it's kind of like, if you tune into sports talk radio, are people talking about it? If you go to a sports bar, are the games on TV and people are watching and talking about it? Is it sort of permeating the national conversation?

Listening to you talk, it strikes me as the most recent example is the U.S. men's hockey team from the most recent Olympics.

MARTINEZ: Yeah. I think that's a good example, yeah.

BRODIE: Do you think that there's a part of measuring success that we won't be able to tell until some amount of time has passed in the sense that we won't really know right away if the World Cup has sort of lit a fire under America in terms of its interest in soccer and whether more kids play youth soccer and whether more people are maybe watching Major League Soccer or even collegiate soccer and continue to pay more attention even to international leagues?

Is that something that you'll be paying attention to in the years to come after this country is one of the co-hosts of this tournament?

MARTINEZ: Yeah, I think that evolution is ongoing, it's irreversible. But I think this World Cup has an opportunity to accelerate it, to give it another uptick.

I mean, at the youth level, it's hard to imagine like many more kids playing rec soccer, because it feels like it's now part and parcel of everyone's childhood.

BRODIE: Yeah, so many already do.

MARTINEZ: But you know, like the legacy of the '94 World Cup, which felt like an outsider's attempt to jumpstart the game in the U.S., as opposed to this one. But that did leave the legacy of MLS. And that was a very conscious project.

But I remember going to some of those games in '94, and some of them were played — there were games at Stanford. There were games in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. I mean, I think a lot of NFL owners back then might not have even returned phone calls from people at FIFA.

Now, the 11 U.S. venues are all NFL stadiums. And in many of these cities, it's only because of the enthusiasm of the NFL franchise to make sure that they got these games, that their games are going to be played there. So, it's a very different proposition.

But I do think we'll have to see whether the World Cup helps push along — I think the MLS still is lagging in terms of its relationship vis-à-vis how big the sport is in the U.S., and it faces this conundrum of globalization where, yes, it's benefiting from America being more connected to the global sport, obviously. But we're so connected now, thanks to globalization, thanks to revolution in media, that I can watch Arsenal on NBC.

So, it has this sort of competitive intrigue. We've gone from, you know, when I first came to the country, you couldn't watch any soccer on television, to a point where you could watch any league on the planet practically here in the States. You’ve just got to figure out which streaming service to sign up for.

BRODIE: Yeah.

MARTINEZ: But they're all there.

BRODIE: Well, because in most American sports — you think about baseball and American football and basketball — if you are in another country and you want to play at the highest level, you come here, right?

Like, if you are a baseball player anywhere else on Earth and you want to play at the highest level, you come to the U.S. If you’re a basketball player, same kind of thing. There are certainly leagues in other places, but not at the same level as in the U.S.

It would seem as though maybe one of the downsides of American success on the world stage is that, at least for right now, it’s still seen as more prestigious for American players to go play in Germany or in Spain or in England or in Mexico than it is to stay and play in Major League Soccer, and for players from other countries — you know, someone like Beckham came to the U.S. or Messi, but it was still very much at the end of their careers, not sort of while they were in their primes.

Is it realistic or would it be realistic, do you think, for MLS to be sort of at the level of La Liga or the Bundesliga or the Premier League, where the top players in England or France or Spain or South Korea would want to come to play in this country in that league in their primes?

MARTINEZ: Yeah, and I think that’s what I was referring to, I think in terms of the next step where we need to see the progress of the sport in the United States. Not only is it more prestigious to go play in Europe, it’s just necessary if you want to play at the highest level at this point. The English Premier League is the NBA or Major League Baseball for that sport.

BRODIE: Yeah.

MARTINEZ: And the economics are going to have to change dramatically, you know, for the MLS to start competing with that. You would need to see such a dramatic spike in ratings. At the end of the day, the big-time sport really is the most important form of media, and its economics is all built around the media rights.

BRODIE: Sure. Interesting. All right, we’ll have to leave it there. Andrés, thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.

MARTINEZ: Thank you, Mark. This is really fun.

BRODIE: Andrés Martinez is co-director of the Great Game Lab at ASU and author of the book, “The Great Game: A Tale of Two Footballs and America’s Quest to Conquer Global Sport.”