The share of Americans who identify as soccer fans jumped 10 percentage points after this summer’s World Cup, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted for Bloomberg. Forty-six percent of respondents said they were soccer fans in September, up from the comparable figure measured just before the tournament kicked off in June.
The poll surveyed roughly 2,000 US adults at each point: 2,004 from May 20-22, before the tournament, and 2,001 from Sept. 11-13, two months after it ended. The jump was broad enough to push soccer past the NHL in fan interest, leaving it just behind college basketball in the national pecking order.
The poll: soccer overtakes the NHL
This isn’t a one-demographic blip. The increase showed up across age groups, including baby boomers — but it wasn’t close to even. Gen Z drove the biggest swing, with a 16-point rise, even as the oldest members of that generation are now in their late 20s.
That generational skew matters more than the topline number. A sport gaining young fans in their 20s is building a base that sticks around for decades of ticket sales, streaming subscriptions and merchandise spend — the opposite of a tournament-week bump that fades by Thanksgiving.
Why the surge is concentrated in young adults
The pattern echoes 1994, when the US last hosted the World Cup. That tournament is credited with launching the modern era of American soccer; MLS kicked off two years later with 10 teams. Three decades on, the league has roughly tripled that club count, and league executives are framing this summer the same way — as a potential inflection point rather than a one-off spike.
The mechanism is straightforward: a home World Cup puts the sport on broadcast and social feeds at a scale no regular MLS season can match, and it does so for an audience — younger, more online, less tied to legacy leagues — already primed to adopt a global sport with a lower historical foothold in the US.
What it means for MLS
The early read-through is already showing up in league data. MLS has reported that ticket sales and viewership have increased since the tournament, and that league and team social accounts combined gained nearly 6 million new followers once the World Cup wrapped. Youth participation in MLS-affiliated programs is reportedly up roughly 40% year over year — the clearest sign that the bump isn’t confined to passive viewership.
None of this guarantees the gain holds. Gallup’s own August tracking found that while soccer hit a record 9% share of “favorite sport” responses — pulling roughly even with basketball and baseball — American football still led comfortably, even as its own share slipped to its lowest point since 2001. The real test for MLS now is converting World Cup-driven awareness into season-ticket renewals and regular-season ratings once the next Concacaf cycle starts without a home World Cup to carry it.
