The end of the 2026 FIFA World Cup marks a major inflection point for soccer in the United States. While the U.S.’ co-hosting duties, along with round-the-clock media coverage of the American team, helped soccer’s status explode over the last month, the sport has never maintained long-term popularity in the U.S. on the same level as, say, the NFL. But some believe that may all be changing.
The arrival of the tournament always brings up the “quadrennial question: Can this be the World Cup that finally converts U.S. sports fans to soccer fanatics?” said Forbes. In 2026, the “answer might be yes, or at least closer than ever.” Many Americans have shied away from soccer because what they “find electrifying is the possibility and manifestation of drastic change” and large comebacks, like those often seen in football and baseball. Soccer’s “low-scoring structure makes such reversals rare.”
But many are hopeful that the 2026 World Cup marked the beginning of a turnaround. The “macro picture,” former U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati told The Athletic, has “always been about: what does it look like the day after” the tournament ends? A similar enthusiasm happened when the U.S. hosted the 1994 World Cup, but a “key difference between 1994 and now wasn’t just that American players then couldn’t fathom playing professional soccer, but that there was no real route to do so — at least domestically.”
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Three decades later, though, the United States has created “not just the soccer-specific stadiums and training grounds, but also the academies and pathways that led to a generation of players,” said The Athletic. Despite the U.S.’ loss to Belgium, the “next Christian Pulisic or Leo Messi somewhere along the way might have attended a game, and perhaps is going to be sitting in the stands in the World Cup final, and will see the greatest players in the world, and say, ‘Wow, I want that to be me,’” Don Garber, the commissioner of Major League Soccer (MLS), told The Athletic.
Others believe that MLS, the U.S.’ top professional soccer league, helped ingrain soccer into the United States even before this year’s World Cup. MLS is an “established, stable American sports league” whose “franchises keep increasing in value,” said The Tennessean. There is also the U.S. Women’s National Team, a dominant force that has “won four World Cups since 1991.” And while there has been “public discourse on a flawed youth soccer system in this country,” soccer enthusiasts are hopeful it will “lead to necessary improvements at the ground level” and that “American soccer will grow from this.”
What next?
There is also some data supporting the idea that soccer’s popularity may be here to stay. More than half of Americans, 57%, think the World Cup will “increase America’s general interest in soccer,” according to an Ipsos survey of 1,027 adults. Many of those polled also said their overall excitement about the game had grown, with enthusiasm about the World Cup rising from 25% in May to 38% in July.
The excitement about soccer is particularly strong among Gen Zers, as the sport is “already disproportionately popular among this demographic,” said YouGov. Gen Z adults “make up nearly a fifth of all soccer followers compared to just a tenth of the overall U.S. population (18% vs 10%).” Much of the data shows that the World Cup was a primer to “make America a soccer nation,” said Forbes.
