Why Americans don't like soccer and probably never will like it particularly much (some of these points were already raised by Mandelbaum in the OP's article):
1. Not enough scoring and too many ties. This is hurting hockey, too, which is part of why we only have 3 1/2 major sports (4 if you count hockey and NASCAR as half a major each). Basketball routinely runs scores into the 80's and 90's in the course of a 42 minute game, football into the teens at LEAST unless one or both teams is bad on offense or terriffic on defense, and even baseball games are rarely 2-1 or 1-0 anymore (if I had to guess, I'd say the average is 4-5 runs per team per game at this point). Basketball and baseball never tie, and football rarely (never in college and never in the pros in the playoffs).
2. Too much competition. The US is a huge market with a lot of disposable time and income, but three established major sports plus hockey and NASCAR chew up too much of it. Worse, there's simply no part of the year where soccer wouldn't be competing with a major sport (baseball from mid-spring to mid-fall, football from late summer to mid-winter, basketball from fall to early summer). And where our majors overlap, one usually goes unnoticed until the other one ends--baseball doesn't hit its stride until after basketball season is over, nobody in America cares about basketball before the Super Bowl. The only overlap where both sports get attention is late fall, when baseball is in the playoffs and the NFL and college seasons are starting (football is so dominant it can successfully compete no matter how much competition it faces--the Arena League, which plays a slightly different version of football and is considered a joke by many NFL and college fans gets better ratings on ABC than the NHL). Soccer would have to cut into (has tried to cut into, in fact) another sport's pie. Soccer may be older than America, but IN America it's essentially 100 years behind baseball, football and basketball.
Worse, soccer has competition among the minor sports. America has a professional lacrosse league, a summer professional football league, a women's professional basketball league, a professional golf league, some of the best professional tennis in the world, niche sports of all kinds played at the college level, horse racing, three different kinds of auto racing, and of course professional hockey. There's also professional wrestling, which isn't a real sport because the contests are rigged and everybody cheerfully acknowledges the fact, but it combines violence that's more "real" than staged drama (they pull their punches, but they're still jumping on each other and throwing each other to the ground, without stunt doubles or second takes) with melodramatic storylines. There IS a professional soccer league in the US, but it's way down the ladder and competing with flashier sports just to get the attention televised poker tournaments do. In fact, I'd be surprised if soccer's TV ratings here (minus big events like the Olympics or the World Cup which will have all the foreign riffraff we let in here absolutely riveted) beat things like professional billiards and bowling on ESPN 2.
There was a women's professional league, too, which was built to capitalize on the US women's team's success in 1999, with nationally known stars like Mia Hamm (who went out of their way to be accessible to the fans and were, in many cases, incredibly
attractive), playing in big markets like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, tapping a market with huge disposable income that was virtually ignored previously who played soccer and idolized the US women's team's players (young middle class suburban girls), a huge marketing push, cheap tickets, family friendly games with lots of activities beforehand, TV time on local stations, and lots of national press after we won in 1999 (after all, that was the first US soccer team to achive any kind of international success). That league went bankrupt last year and folded.
3. We've already got a game where you run back and forth and try to put a ball in a goal. That would be basketball, and while it's not soccer, it's close enough, and we've got the best players in the world already--we grow most of them here and the rest we import. Basketball is by far the "cheap" sport of choice in the cities (all you need to play is a ball and a hoop) and can be enjoyed as a team or one on one. Soccer is cheap, too (you only need two trash cans for a goal if you don't have a net), but it's not played at all in the city and in the suburbs it's played mostly in youth leagues that cost money to join. Mandelbaum is wrong, by the way, about football not being a cheap sport. All you need is a ball and enough players to make two teams. The expensive equipment is needed for league play, but I and everyone else I know played both touch and tackle football informally. If there was no American football, kids who didn't like basketball probably would play soccer in sandlots or side streets, but when a full sized rubber football that will last for years costs $15 and you're allowed to tackle people, informal soccer games are a third choice, at best.
4. Soccer is, for accurately or not, considered a wussy sport in America. It doesn't help that the game is more popular among girls than boys and rarely played by members of the more aggressive young subcultures (primarily urban).
EDIT: Well, how about that. Got locked while I was writing and didn't even notice because I'M A MOD. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. By the way, if anyone is interested, the actual link is
here. WHYY 91 FM, Philadelphia's NPR station, also interviewed him for an hour on a local show called Radio Times (I knew I've heard of this guy before). Click
here and type "Mandelbaum" in the search field to get a link to a Real Audio transcript of the conversation, during which he talks about why he thinks soccer hasn't caught on.
