The vapid ignorance on this thread is hardly surprising, since I bet most of those posting are fine with watching a sport that requires mealworm length attention spans i.e. “American Football”, golf, or baseball.
A typical soccer player can run any other team sports athlete into the ground in less than 10 minutes.
More people have died playing the sport than “American” sports.
Most people also don’t know that soccer almost became our national sport in the 1880s, but the Ivy Leagues opted for a cross of it with Rugby. There are plenty of books out there regarding that. It’s how “football” (bastardized name) was invented.
A pretty broad brush. Collegiate lacrosse is a pretty intense sport and players are always on the move, as besides passing, they have to advance with the lacrosse ball. I dare say they do more running than soccer players.
Just one example ...
You are 100% correct when you point out the superb physical condition that is needed to play continuously for two halves of 45-50 minutes apiece. So what? It takes even more conditioning to run a marathon, but that doesn’t mean long-distance running is a popular spectator sport.
My biggest complaint about soccer is that it seems to have been frozen in time at a point in human history when an hourglass was used to track time and an air-filled rubber ball was the most advanced invention in human civilization.