Exactly.
Soccer is played in just about every country on the planet, they can't ALL be socialist, can they?
It is truly universal and transcends politics.
What America misses out on, because American Football is not a real international sport, is the camaraderie, patriotism, and national sense of unity in getting behind "Our Team" in major international competition.
Whole Countries close down all over the World while their team is playing a major World Cup game, and the national celebrations when they win are spectacular.
America never experiences that; they had the "Miracle on Ice" but that was a one off event.
Bingo! The World Cup is one of the last bastions of good old-fashioned jingoism left, in this age of globalism. I think it's exactly what we need now, just like we needed it in 1980.
But the World Cup would be much huger than even that. Like I said, if the US were ever in position, most people would get on board. I would even suspect the finals would get "Super Bowl" like ratings here in the US if the US made it. (Unless the game started at 4 AM in the morning)
That has nothing to do with our football not being international. That has to do with us hanging our hats on something other than sports. The World Baseball Classic (America’s past time and an international sport) is going on right now and we aren’t shutting down for it.
This is a 300+ million person country that spans 6 time zones. We aren’t going to shut down and have a “spectacular celebration” for any sport ever. For one thing you can guarantee that 100 million of them don’t even like that sport no matter what the sport is.
And thats why the rest of the world has much higher unemployment, astonishingly high welfare states, government imposed vacation mandates on all businesses, and national productivity on par with small states in America.
I will stick with being the most powerful economic country on the planet and responsible for the vast majority of human advancement over the past 100 years over getting behind a team.