Why baseball is much bigger than football soccer in the U.S.
Baseball is huge in the U.S., soccer is not. Soccer is huge worldwide, baseball is not. So why is baseball so big in the U.S. and soccer ain’t..??
1. In the nineteenth century, soccer was used to cement business relationships, just as golf might be used today. The British elite – led by “gentlemen amateurs” — spread soccer through the empire with deliberately imperial goals.
2. American baseball was commercialized to greater degree. Monopoly leagues made the game more profitable and better organized, but were less effective for spreading the sport overseas. Monopolists, after all, do restrict output to some degree. The U.S. organized few overseas baseball tours, but we did get baseball to the Caribbean and Japan.
3. The rise of nationalism in the early twentieth century boosted soccer as a means of expressing rivalries; no comparable international network existed for baseball at the time.
4. The combination of hierarchical leagues and not-for-profit clubs, which has characterized soccer for the twentieth century, is poorly suited to the age of modern commercial sport. Its days probably are numbered.
..from the Brookings Institute’s new book distribution of soccer and baseball around the world. Link and text from Marginal Revolution.
