Soccer Is Now America's No. 2 Sport

Gallup's fourth place is not much of a fourth place

Soccer's 9% sits one point behind baseball and two behind basketball. In late 2023, Gallup had soccer at 5% and American football at 41%. The gap below the leader has compressed quickly.

Gallup's published national margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points, wider than the full spread between soccer, baseball and basketball. That does not make the three results interchangeable, but it does make one thing clear: Gallup measured a tight contest for second, not a settled fourth place for soccer.

The cross-tabs are more striking. Soccer is already second by point estimate among men, adults aged 35 to 54, households earning under $50,000 and respondents educated to high-school level or below. Among non-white respondents it is joint second with basketball.

The 35-to-54 result is the one that breaks the old story. Soccer on 14% in that group is not a youth-market promise for some future decade. It is a mainstream audience now.

Americans were already watching 79.8 billion minutes of soccer

Nielsen says U.S. viewers spent 79.8 billion minutes watching soccer in 2025. That is the more useful starting point because it treats soccer as one sport rather than asking MLS, the Premier League or Liga MX to stand in for the whole market.

Soccer is unusually fragmented in the United States. A supporter can watch Premier League in the morning, LaLiga in the afternoon, Liga MX at night and MLS at the weekend, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish. Those audiences appear in different rights reports and different ratings stories, but they are all football consumption.

Nielsen's own 2025 work identified Liga MX, the Champions League and the Premier League as the three biggest U.S. soccer properties by viewership. Any ranking built around MLS alone, or around English-language television alone, starts with a large part of the market missing.

The World Cup changed the scale

Nielsen says World Cup matches generated more than 84 billion minutes of U.S. television viewing in June alone across FOX, FS1 and Telemundo. Its June reporting interval ended before the biggest knockout matches and before the final. In less than a month of measured tournament viewing, the World Cup had already produced more U.S. viewing than Nielsen recorded for all soccer across the whole of 2025.

The full tournament averages show why. FOX's English-language coverage averaged 7.737 million viewers across all 104 matches. Telemundo and Peacock reported a 6.3 million Spanish-language Total Audience Delivery average across those same 104 matches. The final pushed the split into full view: FOX's match-only window averaged 42.5 million, while Telemundo and Peacock reported 23.9 million for the Spanish-language presentation.

The American soccer audience is not an English-language audience with a Spanish-language add-on. It is a bilingual market at national scale.

America's biggest club-football market speaks Spanish

TelevisaUnivision says the 2026 Liga MX Clausura reached 21.6 million U.S. viewers and describes Liga MX as the country's most-watched club soccer league regardless of language. From January through May, its networks accounted for 47% of all U.S. soccer viewing among adults aged 18 to 49.

That makes the measurement problem obvious. If America's biggest club-football audience is largely consumed in Spanish, then an English-first sports hierarchy will systematically undersell soccer.

LaLiga adds another large audience. ESPN says the competition reached 20.1 million U.S. viewers during the 2025/26 season. The season-long viewing-minute totals published for LaLiga and the Premier League are not cleanly comparable, so SportsGlare does not rank the two against each other. Taken together, though, the published figures point to more than 20 billion minutes of U.S. viewing across those two leagues alone, before Liga MX, Champions League, MLS or national-team football are added.

This is why soccer keeps looking smaller than the audience actually is. Its biggest properties are sold separately, measured separately and discussed separately. The sport is larger than any one of those pieces.

The post-World-Cup audience held

The first club numbers after the tournament do not look like a market snapping back to its old level. Brentford against Tottenham averaged 1.2 million across NBC and Peacock on opening weekend. Elche against Barcelona drew 1.0 million on ABC. Espanyol against Real Madrid added 811,000 on ESPN. These were ordinary early-season club matches, not national-team events riding the World Cup itself.

MLS has moved in the same direction. The league says it averaged 7.9 million live match viewers per week through the first three months of 2026 across Apple TV, domestic linear partners, Canada and international distribution: a 62% year-on-year increase on its reported comparison basis. After the World Cup, Reuters reported league figures showing ticket sales up 62% compared with the 40 days before the tournament, while MLS said recent TV audiences were up 40% to 50%.

The stadium numbers reinforce the point. On 9 September, 63,094 attended Chicago Fire against Inter Miami at Soldier Field, a club record. MLS averaged 21,988 spectators per regular-season match in 2025. Through May 2026, its published average was 22,109.

The old ranking no longer fits

There is no perfect public table ranking every American sport on one identical measurement basis. Baseball has huge local inventory. Basketball is split between national and local rights. College football is measured through a different structure again. Soccer has perhaps the most fragmented rights map of all.

American football remains first by a distance. Below it, describing soccer as America's fourth sport now requires its audience to be split by competition, language and platform before it is counted. Gallup cannot statistically separate soccer from baseball and basketball at the national level, Nielsen already measured almost 80 billion minutes of soccer before the home World Cup, Spanish-language viewing is central rather than peripheral, and the post-tournament audience has held. The old hierarchy no longer fits the market.

Soccer is now America's No. 2 sport.