World Cup: How USA is embracing football – and impacting the global game | Football News

Football is having an increasing influence in the USA – but the USA is having an increasing influence on football, too.

As the States makes its final preparations to host the World Cup this summer, along with Mexico and Canada, it feels like the moment is coming when the global game may finally break America.

While women’s football has long been established there, men’s football is becoming mainstream.

This World Cup will be the third major tournament in a row hosted in the country (after the 2024 Copa America and 2025 Club World Cup), Premier League viewing is on the rise and LaLiga is openly aiming to capitalise on the US market with a game across the Atlantic.

But the States is also having an increasing and significant impact on how the sport looks and how it is run across the world.

America’s game?

“When you look at what’s happened to football in the United States… soccer in the United States… When you think about it, shouldn’t it really be called [football]? I mean, this is football. We have to come up with another name for the NFL stuff.” – Donald Trump

‘It’s called soccer’ was the USA chant at the last World Cup but, ahead of the next edition, US President Donald Trump has had his say on the matter. The sport could not get a more high-profile endorsement from the American public.

FIFA boss Gianni Infantino has pursued closer ties with Trump – including through that much-mocked FIFA Peace Prize award – but the President has been keen to speak out about his support for the game and this summer’s showpiece.

His connection with football is long-standing – as fans of the Rumbelows Cup draws will know – but it is also helpful to link himself with a sport on the rise in his country.

Trump was there at the Club World Cup final – how could you miss him? – when Chelsea beat Paris St-Germain in front of 81,118 fans in New Jersey.

The subsequent first round of Premier League games this season was the most-watched opening weekend on record in the States. Audiences are up 13 per cent over the past three years compared to the three years prior.

Twelve matches in the 2024/25 Premier League season achieved over one million viewers. That is a modest figure given the size and scale of USA but it is the trajectory that is key.

The Premier League is keen to fuel the growth. The competition’s Summer Series in 2023 and 2025 put friendlies in the spotlight and drew 82,566 to watch Man Utd vs West Ham.

Liverpool, Leeds and Sunderland are signed up for pre-season tours in the States this summer.

Meanwhile, LaLiga are attempting to tap into the market in an even more significant way.

Barcelona were scheduled to face Villarreal in Miami in December 2025 in an official league game. It would have been the first authentic game abroad for a major league.

Those plans were begrudgingly cancelled amid a backlash but LaLiga’s subsequent statement reflected their ambition to make the USA game happen in the future. They said LaLiga “deeply regrets that this project, which represented a historic and unparalleled opportunity for the internationalisation of Spanish football, cannot go ahead.”

Barcelona also noted “the missed opportunity to expand the image of the competition in a strategic market with growth potential and resource generation for the benefit of all.”

Major League Soccer, America’s own top football league, has Lionel Messi as its main attraction right now. The legendary Argentina World Cup winner was a huge signing for the league and David Beckham’s Inter Miami. But with Messi 38 years old, US football could do with its own breakout star.

In this past season, there were just four Americans playing in the Premier League – Chris Richards, Tyler Adams, Antonee Robinson and Brenden Aaronson – and prospects for the national team, despite Mauricio Pochettino’s management, are low. Their talent remains on the fringes of the world’s biggest sport.

But when FIFA takes over New York’s iconic Times Square for the third-place play-off and then the final of this World Cup, football will, briefly, be front and centre in America. It is a huge opportunity for the game to take a massive stride forward in what is an enormous potential territory for the sport’s marketeers.

“What America can do is put on a show,” Gregg Broughton tells Sky Sports. Broughton is Chicago Fire’s British sporting director, who has seen first hand the rise of the game in the States following previous roles at Blackburn Rovers, Norwich City and Bodo/Glimt.

He expects the impact of the World Cup in the States to be game-changing.

“It will really engage the spectators here in the United States and really help drive a new generation of spectators here within America.

“I think it will be the greatest World Cup of all time. I really believe that. I think once the games start and the controversies are put to the side, it will really, really shine.”

Ideally, says Broughton, the interest boost this summer will translate into a greater domestic focus on MLS, which has taken a mid-season pause to make way for the World Cup.

“The Premier League has got a big hold already, but it’s ensuring that [the World Cup buzz] carries over to MLS now and that we get spectators through on the back of it.”

Through its history, MLS has been renowned for doing things its own way – from play-offs to unusual penalty shootout formats.

But next year it will shift to a calendar in line with European seasons, kicking off in late summer and concluding in the following spring.

“Once that alignment takes place, I think it will really allow the league to accelerate even further,” says Broughton.

But if there are examples of US football fandom and structures flexing towards European culture, there are also powerful ideas and influence coming from the country and impacting the world game.

How US ideas, innovations and money is impacting football

Much like Trump’s relationship with Infantino, football’s connection with the USA is a two-way street.

We caught a glimpse of what an Americanised future for the sport could look like at the Club World Cup last year, from individual player walk-ons to public votes for the ‘superior player award’.

For the first time, this World Cup will have an NFL-style half-time show at the final and halves will effectively become quarters, with mandatory drinks breaks in every game, regardless of weather conditions.

But there is a more fundamental influence, too, with the increase in American ownership of football clubs in Europe.

In the Premier League this past season, 11 of the 20 sides are majority owned by Americans or American firms. In the Championship it was nine out of 24, including the high-profile project of Rob Reynolds and Rob Mac at Wrexham.

There are also the celebrity investments, such as those of Tom Brady at Birmingham, JJ Watt at Burnley and Snoop Dogg at Swansea.

That ownership and investment gives American stakeholders the opportunity to shape the game on these shores, from how they run their own clubs to how they deploy their voting rights on wider issues in the game.

Could promotion and relegation, transfers or budgets – all approached differently in US sports – become Americanised in the future?

It is conceivable to imagine the game further and more seriously switching up its product to meet the interests of such a huge potential US market.

A new era for the game could be launched this summer if America finally fully embraces soccer – or, as Trump would call it, football.