America is building a soccer economy before it builds a soccer culture

A World Cup is easy to understand in the U.S. It’s a big event, a lucrative event, a chance for cities and companies to sell themselves to a global audience. But men’s soccer on an ordinary week is where things get murkier. Football owns Sundays (and now Thursdays and playoff Saturdays and holidays). Baseball drifts through summer like weather. Basketball and hockey have their own seasonal grammar. Men’s soccer — for all its TV rights deals and all its high-profile signings — still doesn’t command that kind of reflexive domestic place.

Gallup’s numbers still put soccer well behind football, basketball, and baseball (in that order) as Americans’ favorite sport to watch, and researchers who study the sport’s U.S. standing keep returning to the same fact: The highest-status version of men’s soccer still lives outside the country’s borders. And yet, ahead of the 2026 World Cup, the U.S. is building the business around the sport.

But soccer culture isn’t just audience. It’s the scarf, the pub, the pregame walk, the songs everyone knows by heart, the feeling that missing the match would be socially irresponsible or spiritually bankrupt. I still have (and occasionally try to wear) a child’s medium Arsenal kit from the 2004-05 season that I got back when I was in elementary school; I know what irrational attachment looks like when it has had years to marinate. The U.S. has pockets. It has Premier League — supporting bars that overflow, supporter groups that travel, and communities that organize their weekends around matches. What it still lacks on the men’s side is the thick, broadly shared version of that life — the kind that feels inherited instead of scheduled.

The White House task force says the Club World Cup and the men’s World Cup together are projected to generate $26.8 billion in U.S. GDP and more than 290,000 jobs. FEMA has awarded $625 million for security across the 11 U.S. host cities; Massachusetts alone says it’s spending nearly $86 million on World Cup preparation. The Federal Transit Administration has announced over $100 million for public transportation. Cities are building fan festivals. Sponsors are buying their patches of civic life. Partners are bundling the tournament into premium packages. MLS and its partners are circling the event like traders around an earnings call. Bars are angling for later last calls. Everybody, it seems, has a plan for monetizing men’s soccer in America.

But what about what any of this looks like when the big tournament ends and the spotlight on the game dims? The place of the game in American life still feels far less settled than the commercial apparatus now rising around it. So now, before the U.S. proves it can live with men’s soccer, it’s trying to prove — in spectacular fashion — that it can sell it.

Turning a one-month spectacle into a long-term business

A lot of U.S. sports businesses have spent years looking at soccer as a giant, slightly unruly audience that keeps wandering off to England, Spain, France, Latin America, international tournaments, and whatever absurdly timed match starts before breakfast on the East Coast. The 2026 World Cup offers a monthlong chance to interrupt that behavior at scale. It’s a live demonstration, dropped onto home soil, for what soccer attention looks like when nobody has to squint across an ocean — or seven different TV packages — to find it.

A Harris poll found that 32% of U.S. soccer fans say a specific competition, such as the World Cup, first sparked their interest in the sport, and 47% say they follow individual stars as much as a specific team. That’s a very different fan-formation model from the typical U.S. script, where allegiance usually starts with family, geography, or school and then stays put for decades. Tournament fans can be won. But tournament fans can also wander off. 

MLS knows it. Apple $AAPL knows it. Bars know it. Sponsors know it. Everybody around the event is trying to answer the same question: How much of that month can be kept once the flags come down and the global audience goes home?

Apple folding MLS into the main Apple TV package for 2026 is part of that answer. Starting this season, Apple TV subscribers in more than 100 countries and regions can watch every MLS match with no blackouts. Apple has also pushed its live sports package into DirecTV, DirecTV for Business, Comcast $CMCSA, and EverPass, which means MLS now sits inside more than 300,000 bars, restaurants, hotels, and other commercial venues. This is the very American version of culture-building: Don’t import Argentine terraces or English away-day life; widen distribution, make the product easier to find, and hope habit follows convenience.

Host cities are chasing the same afterglow with a lot of glossy renderings and even glossier expectations. Cities get tourism shine, hotel taxes, and the flattering illusion that they’ve become part of the global sports map. Companies get a fresh crowd to sell to. MLS gets to lurk nearby, hoping some of the world’s game sticks to the domestic product once the fireworks are gone. If culture won’t arrive the old-fashioned way, maybe it can be nudged along with enough distribution and enough expensive optimism.

The world’s game meets the American premium machine

Then there’s the part where the U.S. takes a planet-scale block party and immediately starts pumping it for luxury upside. Final-match seats at MetLife $MET start at $4,185, prompting complaints from European supporters over dynamic pricing, transparency, and access. U.S. lawmakers pushed FIFA to lower prices, warning that the tournament risked becoming “the most financially exclusionary and inaccessible to date” and undercutting the host cities’ attempts to make it feel public. The whole U.S. sports-business instinct in one little price tag. A World Cup is supposed to feel like noise, nerves, flags, songs, strangers briefly acting like cousins. The American version keeps finding its way to the velvet rope.

Travel and tourism are another huge pillar, and U.S. travel is in a so-called “Trump Slump.” The World Cup could reportedly draw more than one million foreign visitors to the U.S. and account for roughly one-third of the increase in foreign arrivals in 2026. Searches for flights and lodging around the tournament are already up 70% year over year, with accommodations expected to rise 30% to 60% in some cases. So yes, the World Cup could help bring foreign travelers back in force. But it’s a little awkward to sell that rebound while the country keeps surrounding the invitation with threat theater.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has warned that the White House needs to reassure fans they’re welcome because fears around U.S. immigration enforcement could keep people away. Rights groups have said visa bans and deportation raids could create fear among fans, journalists, workers, and local communities. Amnesty International has called for a guarantee that World Cup events won’t be targeted for immigration enforcement. And now, the U.S. border has its own premium tier. The State Department says nationals from 50 countries applying for B-1/B-2 visitor visas may have to post bonds ranging from $5,000 to $15,000; the expanded $15,000 tier takes effect April 2. Countries on the list include Algeria, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia.

So the tournament brochure says global celebration. The machinery says premium inventory, security perimeter, masked enforcement, and maybe a refundable bond on the way in. Teams can come. But some supporters may need extra cash, extra patience, extra documentation, and extra faith that the invitation still includes them.

The U.S. can stage soccer. Culture is another matter

Men’s soccer in the U.S. still lives with a status problem that money can’t fully sand down. The NFL is football’s peak. The NBA is basketball’s. MLB and the NHL still carry that same home-field advantage in their own ways. Men’s soccer asks American fans to invest deeply in a domestic landscape while the sport’s grand cathedrals still sit overseas or inside international tournaments. The Premier League, La Liga, the Champions League, the World Cup — those still feel like the sport’s real stained glass. MLS is asking people to believe in the neighborhood church while the famous cathedral remains on another continent.

A Harris poll found that 65% of soccer fans say Americans are soccer fans — even while soccer still doesn’t feel like an “American” sport. For Soccer found that two-thirds of U.S. soccer fans follow multiple leagues, while only about a quarter follow just one team. YouGov found that MLS interest is growing, but still modest.

Women’s soccer sits in a different cultural category. Plenty of U.S. soccer brains were wired on Mia Hamm, Megan Rapinoe, Abby Wambach, and Kristine Lilly, on a side of the sport that already had emotional legitimacy here, already had stars and memory and a national story people could name without rummaging around for one. The NWSL’s business has been catching up to that cultural reality in a hurry, with expansion fees exploding from $2 million in 2020 to a reported $165 million for Atlanta.

The men’s side has arrived at a different moment, with more money around it than certainty, more packaging than permanence, more people in suits talking about upside than people who can explain why the sport should feel at home on a Tuesday afternoon in September.

By the end of summer, the U.S. will crown a World Cup champion. A month later, football will still run the calendar, baseball will still drift across the background, and men’s soccer will still be staring at the same question: Can it make itself feel inevitable here, or does it still need a giant event and a very expensive sales pitch to hold the room?