Play #022: The World Cup will bring millions of new fans to football in America. The question is who keeps them.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the biggest moment in American football history. Bigger than 1994. Bigger than Messi signing for Inter Miami. Bigger than anything MLS has manufactured in thirty years of trying.
104 matches. 11 US cities. An estimated 32 million new football fans created in its wake. The tournament starts in June. The spotlight is already on.
And everyone is looking at MLS as the winner.
Just, I’m not so sure.
What MLS Built
To be fair to MLS, they built something real. Thirty teams. Average attendance second only to the Premier League globally. Club valuations approaching NHL territory. Star power in Messi and Son Heung-min that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The foundations exist. The league is legit.
But legitimacy and belonging are different things. And MLS, for all its growth, has consistently prioritised the former over the latter.
The Apple TV deal tells you everything you need to know about how MLS thinks. A $2.5 billion, ten-year exclusive that put the league behind a paywall at the exact moment it needed to be growing its audience. A third of World Cup fans said the paywall stopped them from watching MLS. Two thirds said they were unlikely to follow MLS if the setup stayed as it was. They’ve dropped the paywall for 2026. But three years of friction may have already cost them the casual fan they most needed to convert.
Then there’s the expansion fee. San Diego FC paid $500 million to enter MLS in 2025. Five hundred million dollars people! That number doesn’t describe a community football club. It describes a franchise. An asset class. A product built for investors first and fans somewhere further down the list.
That’s the MLS model. Controlled. Centralised. Closed. No path from the bottom to the top. No drama of the underdog. Just the same thirty storylines in different shirts, year after year. It works for the NFL. It works for the NBA. I truly believe football is a different sport with a different soul.
And when a franchise inevitably stops working commercially in a city, there’s no relegation to absorb the blow. No natural consequence. The only available move is to find a city that wants you more. The NFL has done it. The NBA has done it. I’m not gonna call which franchise I believe is most likely to, but I do predict an MLS team will do it too. Probably sooner than anyone expects.
The Cities MLS Left Behind
Detroit. Las Vegas. Phoenix. Three of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Zero MLS teams between them. MLS Commissioner Don Garber has spoken openly about a pause in expansion until after the 2026 World Cup. So when thirty-two million new football fans are created this summer, a significant number of them will live in cities with no MLS club to follow.
Enter USL.
What USL Is Building
The USL is already in Detroit. Already in Phoenix. Already planting flags in the cities MLS overlooked, the communities that were deemed too small or too uncertain for a half-billion dollar franchise fee.
New Mexico United. Oakland Roots. Detroit City FC. Rhode Island FC. These aren’t brands parachuted into a city. They’re clubs woven into the fabric of their communities. You can feel the difference between a club that means that and one that doesn’t. This is what makes what’s coming so compelling.
The numbers are moving. USL viewership has more than tripled in a decade. Twenty-two new football-specific stadiums built or in development since 2020. A $1.5 billion investment in the groundwork happening in the places nobody is watching.
And then there’s the now well documented structural move that changes everything, as USL launches a new Division One in 2028, with promotion and relegation built in. For the first time in American sports history, a team can enter at the bottom and reach the top. A club in Albuquerque or Buffalo or Jacksonville can dream about something. That’s the entire soul of football as a sport, finally arriving in America.
USL is positioning itself to catch exactly the wave the World Cup creates and to keep the fans MLS can’t reach. A wave ride even Kelly Slater would be envious of.
The Pattern
This has happened before. The 1994 World Cup was the most attended in history. It proved Americans would show up for world-class football. And FIFA’s requirement for hosting was the creation of a top-tier league, which is how MLS was born in 1996.
But 1994 was a different America. Football had no infrastructure, no community roots, no lower leagues with identity and soul. MLS had a blank canvas.
There’s also an argument that neither MLS nor USL may be the real winner this time.
Research shows that 68% of avid American football fans prefer international leagues, with the Premier League leading the way. The American Premier League fanbase has grown 62.3% since 2020, reaching over 30 million fans by 2024. A new fan watches the World Cup, falls in love with Cole Palmer or Enzo Fernández, follows them back to Chelsea, and never looks at MLS or USL again. That is the pattern. It has always been the pattern.
The real question isn’t MLS vs USL. It’s whether any domestic league can compete with the gravitational pull of the Premier League, La Liga and the Champions League for the attention of a brand new fan who now has every match available on their phone.
MLS has Messi. The Premier League has everything else.
Both leagues are fighting for a slice of an audience that may largely be heading somewhere else entirely.
MLS was built on the back of that World Cup moment. It captured the energy, structured it, franchised it, and grew it into something legitimate over thirty years.
In 2026 the lights are already on. USL has been building community football for years. The clubs exist. The fans exist. The stadiums are being built. When the World Cup creates its thirty-two million new fans, many of them won’t be starting from scratch. They’ll be joining something that already exists in their city, their neighbourhood, their community.
MLS gets the opening ceremony. USL gets what comes after.
What Happens Next
Everyone is looking at the World Cup as MLS’s moment. The mainstream narrative writes itself. American football finally arrives, MLS is the beneficiary, the league takes its place alongside the NFL and the NBA as a permanent fixture in American sports culture.
Maybe. But I keep thinking about what happens six months, twelve months, two years after the final whistle. When the tourists have gone home and the casual fans are looking for somewhere to put their new passion. When they search for a local team and find either a $500 million franchise playing in a stadium built for American football, or a supporters section that already knows every word to every chant.
The USL isn’t going to eclipse MLS overnight. That was always a longer game than the headlines suggested. But the World Cup accelerates a timeline that was already moving. The community infrastructure being built right now, in the cities MLS left behind, is going to surprise people.
Everyone is watching MLS take its bow. Nobody is asking what happens to the thirty-two million new fans who don’t live in an MLS city. I am.
If you enjoyed this read, I went deeper on USL last year.Why USL Will Eclipse MLS And It Won't Even Be Close
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