World Cup...

[Scooby921]

I can’t believe I have to explain this...football isn’t a popular sport in China, India or even USA, really.

Is this just your opinion, or did you look up specifics and still post this knowing it is incorrect?

The Chinese Super League is one of the biggest spenders in the world of football. I'm not sure how a club can justify a €60m transfer fee and a €30m/yr player salary if the ticket and merchandise sales aren't there to back it up. As far as viewership and popularity football is #2 to basketball, though articles note that football fans spend more on merchandise than basketball fans. One site I read indicates that 12% of athletes in China play football. I didn't find a number on how many total people are classified as athletes, but even if a lowly 10% of the total population were considered "athletes" then that 12% is nearly 20 million football players.

I can't find much data on India, but it does classify football as a rising sport. It's still behind cricket, but the youth in India has greater interest in football because it's less boring. There are groups in India working to establish playing fields and teams across the majority of schools in the country. The do have their own professional league and at apparently had a season-long viewership of more than 200 million. 10 team league means 18 games (home and away for each) and a total of 180 games if my math is correct. So on average they have more than 1 million people tuning in on TV to watch each match. If only 1% of India's population is interested in or plays football it's still 13 million people.

The USA is far different from what you think you know. Football is now the 3rd most watched sport in the country. The MLS has grown from its original 10 teams in 1998 to 23 teams in 2018, and will expand to 26 teams by 2020. Instead of teams sharing stadiums with hand-egg (American football) teams they now have dedicated football-specific venues with seating capacities similar to many clubs in Europe (20,000 to 60,000). A recent study indicates that 7% of the country plays football. It might be a small overall percentage, but that's still 24 million people. I'm one of that 24 million. I've been playing for 30 years.

Now that we've established that these significantly larger countries have more soccer players than Croatia has total people, how is it that the large, rich countries are importing talent to make themselves better?


I get it. You're proud of your neighboring country. I'm happy for them too. They work hard. They play hard. They earned it. If you want to say it's impressive for a country with 1/10th the population of England I agree. In theory a smaller talent pool makes it more difficult to assemble a team of this caliber. But for some reason you decided to bring money into the equation and suggest that all these other countries are buying / importing their players. There is no relationship between money and how good a national team can be. I also don't see a big trend between population and the talent which comes from any given country.