Actually, the great myth is that soccer is #1 everywhere. Lithuania's national sport is basketball. Basketball has made inroads in many places and it's probably more popular in China than soccer is.
Baseball is more part of a few Latin countries than soccer is, just as it is more popular in Japan.
What I will say is that soccer is only the sport because it is cheap and easy to play, caters to an older mindset. Try to get a bunch of kids to play soccer and it takes about 2 minutes to explain the basics. Try to explain football in that time.
People also tend to forget that North America (meaning Canada and US) invented their own sports and don't NEED a handed down sport. Just the fact that hockey, basketball and EVEN football are so popular elsewhere in the world just shows that OUR Sports have their own appeal and that maybe we just innovated a superior set of options for ourselves. Why follow soccer when you can watch the slower baseball, powerful and dramatic football or the ebbs and flows of basketball and performances like Wade's last night.
Great post. I've always been suspicious of that whole "everyone but the US does it," since I've met no Canadians who enjoy it. Not that that means NONE of them do, only that it's odd considering soccer's supposed dominance.
Because of the unique combination of tempo, strategy, tactics, personal skill and beer. Basketball is closest to football in terms of continuous gameplay, flow, whatever (that's what makes it interesting to me) but it's the larger scale of field in combination with the lower score that makes football even better in my eyes.