I had just jumped in the truck and I think I had the local PBS radio station on. They were doing a report on the World Cup and I caught it in the middle. She stated that in terms of number of fans for each sport in the United States soccer was behind only football (American style) and baseball. I was surprised to hear that too but then when you really think about it, it is not that surprising.

First, soccer must be the most popular sport for kids to play here if you base this on number of fields built for them to play it on. There are far more soccer fields in Massachusetts than fields for any other sport. In fact they build and design these huge areas just for soccer now all over the place. We have a location near me that must have about 20 soccer fields and the place is always jammed. It is sponsered by Citizen's Bank, I believe. They just built another complex like it near my brother's home.

All of the professional sports with the exception of the NFL look like they are sort of dying here in United States. I can certainly see soccer becoming more popular here, maybe not with people in our age range but the younger generation I think will embrace soccer over baseball any day. I agree with the people that say baseball is now too slow a game for younger folks. They don't have the patience for a baseball game. In all honesty, I was an all around jock as a kid, played every sport except hockey and I quit the baseball team to play on the soccer team because baseball was just too damn boring to play. I think the key to enjoying any sport is understanding it and younger people who have grown up playing the game do understand it and so would enjoy watching it.

Right now there probably is not a guy like Pele that can be the face of the sport (or maybe there is and I just don't know it) but if they find one that can do this, oh yeah, I can see soccer quickly becoming the number two sport in the United States.

As Ed said too, there are a lot of people here that have brought their love of soccer to the United States and that number is growing.