With the World Cup now underway across North America, the world’s biggest soccer competition is being staged in one of the most established sports markets — despite not being fully absorbed into its sporting identity.
According to a new report from the global market research firm Nielsen, there are now over 136 million soccer fans across North America, up about 11% since 2020. Some 62.5 million of them are in the United States, placing the country among the biggest soccer audiences in the world. In Canada, the sport has already overtaken hockey as the most played by youth. More than three-quarters of American fans are millennials or members of Gen Z. They grew up in a media environment less tethered to local sports ecosystems and more fluent in streaming practices, endlessly scrolling social media clips and consuming cultural content from around the globe. Streaming services have already begun to adapt to this audience, with platforms like Apple TV carrying Major League Soccer (MLS) matches.
As multimedia reporter Talib Visram, who’s been covering the lead-up to the World Cup and the issues surrounding it, told New Lines, this is “a generational change,” driven by younger audiences who are “more curious about the world, have grown up in a more globalized society with more sharing of ideas and cultures, and are big social media users.” That shift is visible online. American fans are now a familiar presence in digital soccer spaces like Reddit, once viewed as the domain of European and Latin American supporters.
But audience sizes are only half the story. In the U.S., fans say they found their way to the sport through things like TV access, video games and, above all, global stars. The arrival of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami, an MLS club based in Florida and positioned as one of the league’s flagship franchises, accelerated interest in a sport that was already growing, thanks in part to English star David Beckham’s run with the MLS that began nearly two decades ago. “America loves stars!” Visram said. “Celebrity turns a lot of heads, more than in other cultures.”
Increasingly, MLS has become a destination for some of soccer’s biggest names, from Beckham (who now co-owns Inter Miami) to Messi and Uruguayan Luis Suarez. Other stars, like French player Antoine Griezmann and Brazil’s Casemiro, have openly discussed the league as a final stop in their careers, instead of Saudi Arabia. (Canada’s soccer culture, meanwhile, is more club-oriented. Half of fans rank international club football as their top format, suggesting a fandom built around enduring club loyalties rather than events like the World Cup.)
Soccer’s expanding base is also diverse. Women’s soccer, often overlooked, gave the sport a kind of cultural stability in the U.S., long before Messi’s arrival. The women’s national team has won four FIFA Women’s World Cups — more than any other country in the world — as well as five Olympic gold medals. It’s turned generations of players into household names and kept the sport visible, even when the men’s team struggled to gain traction.
Soccer in the U.S. has long existed in parallel spaces, sustained in no small part by immigrant communities, where following a national team is part of everyday life. Hispanic Americans have been central to the sport’s presence in the U.S. for decades. A previous Nielsen report found that they are “at the heart of U.S. soccer fandom,” with 38% identifying as World Cup fans, rising to 47% among first- and second-generation Hispanic Americans. They’re also 102% more likely to have watched a World Cup qualifier in the last year.
This year’s World Cup is already gathering a diverse group of American fans around a collective experience — one that is distinctly international. A clip showing locals in Lawrence, Kansas, reacting enthusiastically to the Algerian team’s arrival quickly went viral, amassing millions of views and likes across social media, and illustrating how international teams can generate an emotional reaction, even in places with no direct ties to the team’s country or even the sport.
“I want to say thank you to team Algeria for choosing our hometown, Lawrence, Kansas, to come here. … Welcome to [the] United States, welcome to Kansas,” a resident told an Algerian news crew. “We don’t know too much, but we want to welcome you here.”