The rest of the world build tons of stadiums. There’s 92 soccer teams in England above the “professional” line (though people are still getting paid enough to not need other jobs 2 or 3 more leagues down the pyramid). There’s generally enough stadium capacity in city/town/village for about 20% of the population. English cities are notorious ghost towns if all the local soccer teams are playing at the same time. I’ve joked with a British ex-pat friend that where we have “2 stop light” towns they have “2 soccer team” towns.
And most of the rest of the world follows a similar path to England. Tons of teams, tons of stadiums, very few what we would consider big stadiums, but if you add up the stadium capacity in a city it’s a good chunk of the population.
Games like cricket and field hockey are so popular in many countries because they were once all part of the British empire.