Soccer could be more popular than baseball when World Cup comes to the U.S. in 2026

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption MLB All-Stars on how to make baseball cool again Baseball is struggling to connect with a younger audience, so MLB All-Stars offered up some suggestions on how to fix that.

Baseball’s All-Star Game will take place for the 89th time on Tuesday, coming just two days after the end of soccer’s World Cup and a week before most NFL teams begin reporting for training camp.

This break in the season, along with the relative quiet across the national sports calendar, usually inspires a series of conversations about what’s wrong with baseball and this year has been no exception. Alarms are being sounded across the board about attendance (down about 1,500 fans per game off last year’s total), polling that shows fewer than 10% of Americans call baseball their favorite sport and a league-wide batting average of .247 (lowest since 1968) that has made the game less oriented toward balls in play.

How do you know the problems are real? Serious people affiliated with baseball aren’t writing these issues off as cyclical. Some are even proposing ideas to radically reform the way the game is played. (Former pitcher and broadcaster Jim Kaat, for instance, tweeted over the weekend about shortening games to seven innings.)

More: There's no ducking the numbers: MLB has a bad baseball problem that's only getting worse

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But the real issue with baseball has less to do with the quality of play, number of games or price of tickets. It’s whether an unstoppable generational realignment is taking place that is going to eventually lead to soccer replacing baseball among America's most favorite pastimes.

To be clear, it’s still an open question. The future isn’t written in stone. But with a wildly successful World Cup just ending and MLS on the rise, it’s not inconceivable that soccer’s popularity is going to grow at a rate to surpass baseball by the time the World Cup comes to the U.S. in 2026.

Something has changed in America, even if it’s a bit hard to pin down yet or quantify. You can see it in the social media chatter during a big soccer match, whether it’s the World Cup or the English Premiere League on a Saturday morning in the fall. You can sense it in the packed pubs and parks over the past month to watch games that didn’t even involve a team from the U.S. You can feel it in the energy of a city like downtown Atlanta – the nation’s college football capital – where an MLS team put 72,243 fans in the stadium Sunday and it wasn’t even a surprise.

Is the United States a soccer nation? SportsPulse: Millions of Americans tuned into a World Cup that had no Americans. Which begs the question: Is the United States a soccer nation?

And while it’s unfair to equate a once-in-four-years energy of an international event like the World Cup with a sport like baseball that grinds away day in, day out over a seven-month season, it would be naive to ignore the potential that soccer holds to disrupt the pro sports landscape.

Once derided as too boring for the American sports palate, the theory for years was that soccer’s popularity would turn when the generation that grew up playing youth soccer matured into adults. But that hasn’t really turned out to be true, nor did the expected boom materialize after the 1994 World Cup and 1998 Women’s World Cup were played on our shores.

Rather, what’s truly lifted soccer’s prominence from a viewership standpoint are technology and globalization. Soccer has become the sport of the young and urbane, who tend to live in big, diverse, metropolitan cities and don’t care that the best players in the world are neither American nor play for American teams.

And because the top European leagues are now relatively easy to access on both television and the Internet, it has become natural for people to build a connection with the recognizable, pop culture stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Lionel Messi even when they play across the Atlantic Ocean.

You’d struggle to find a single player in the baseball All-Star Game besides maybe Bryce Harper who is as well-known and recognizable among Americans under age 40 as any of the top international soccer players.

Beyond that, the two-hour window for games appeals to millennials, who are often reticent to commit to three or four hours for watching baseball or football. And when you combine the MLS and its rapid expansion into booming markets such as Orlando, Atlanta and Portland with the popularity of the FIFA video game, you get a sport with a cool factor that appeals to the younger crowd in a way baseball is struggling to connect with.

Again, there hasn’t necessarily been a definitive shift in the American population. Some will point to Fox’s ratings for the World Cup final being down slightly from ABC/ESPN four years ago (the final between France and Croatia drew 17.3 million viewers) and say there’s been little growth in the appetite to actually watch a non-U.S. team play. Conversely, last year's World Series averaged 18.9 million viewers on Fox across seven games.

It’s a fair point. As of today, there are probably more baseball fans in the U.S. than soccer fans.

Maybe that won’t ever change, much less by 2026. But with another World Cup now behind us, it’s clearer than ever that soccer has become part of the mainstream. It’s relevant and hip, two words unlikely to be uttered about the baseball exhibition in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday night.