Friedel added on the challenges that U.S. soccer faces when seeinginternational and MLS action compete with the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB: “Our stadiums are fantastic, training grounds are fantastic, coaching education is better, coaches are better. You know, the sport is growing amongst the amateur levels at a huge pace, all that stuff. But it’s still not the main sport in the U.S. And until it’s the main sport in the U.S. we will never have a golden generation because we’re never going to get all the top athletes and, even more than athletes, the people that just want to die for the sport. Until we have that, we just have to keep trying to build the sport as much as we can.
“The argument people bring to me all the time, and even my friends that are pundits in the game that I played with, they’re all saying: ‘Yeah, but we should be much better with 350 million people’. I say to them: ‘No, if it were population-based, then India would be killing it. China would be killing it. Pakistan would be killing it’.
There’s only one, out of the top 10 most populous countries in the world, there’s only one footballing nation in there, and that’s Brazil. And one of the reasons why they’re the best is because they are a footballing nation, and they have 215 million people or whatever it is who are all crazy for football. If the US were a footballing nation, a cultural footballing nation that had 350 million people, yes, we would be very dominant in tournaments. But we’re not.”