For those who follow me on social media, it’s no secret that my weekends revolve around soccer. With two boys—twelve and ten—playing for Potomac and DC Soccer Club, my Saturdays and Sundays unfold at the Maryland SoccerPlex in Germantown or on fields scattered across Washington DC.
As a board member of DCSC, where nearly 10,000 children train each year, I see the sport not only through the eyes of a parent but also as someone who helps shape its place in our community. And what I witness each weekend feels less like a pastime and more like a quiet cultural revolution.
Stand on the hill overlooking the Soccerplex on any Saturday morning and you’ll see thousands of children chasing the ball across dozens of fields. You’ll hear Turkish blending into Spanish rising above Korean, and English threading through it all as parents—many of whom never played or even watched soccer growing up—cheer, learn, and absorb the rhythms of the world’s game through their children.
Families who once spent spring afternoons on baseball diamonds now find themselves discussing offsides traps, formation shifts, and the difference between a No. 6 and a No. 10. It is a living snapshot of a transformation already well underway: America is becoming a soccer nation—not someday, but right now.
Ironically, one of the strongest forces accelerating this shift is the very technology reshaping every corner of our economy: artificial intelligence. As AI becomes capable of performing an ever-expanding range of cognitive tasks—drafting legal briefs, analyzing financial statements, writing strategy memos, developing software, even producing consulting-grade diagnostics—the traditional boundary separating human and machine work is dissolving. The flood of synthetic content and frictionless productivity has created a new paradox: the more we automate intellectual labor, the more we crave experiences that are physical, communal, unpredictable, and deeply human.
We are shifting from an era of information scarcity to one of connection scarcity. And sports—more than any other cultural institution—sit at precisely that intersection.
A soccer match is never just a contest; it is a choreography of uncertainty, emotion, personality, and tribal belonging. It cannot be scripted. It cannot be faked. And it certainly cannot be automated.
People increasingly joke that they’d welcome AI taking over inbox management, scheduling, early stage research, customer service, or homework grading.
But no one—absolutely no one—is lining up to watch two teams of robots play soccer. You could program android strikers to hit inch-perfect 40-yard passes or execute stepovers with mechanical precision, but it wouldn’t move anyone. There would be no drama, no heartbreak, no “I can’t believe the ref missed that,” no emotional vertigo between hope and despair—just motion.
Sports without emotion is robotics. Soccer without humanity is engineering. And engineering is not entertainment. People may want AI to automate their errands, but nobody wants a chrome-plated midfielder celebrating a goal with a pre-programmed fist pump or a robot taking a theatrical dive in the box. The sport’s inefficiency, its irrationality, its capacity for surprise—these are not bugs in the system. They are the product. And that is precisely why soccer is exploding in an AI-saturated world.
The numbers behind this cultural shift reinforce what I see every weekend on the fields. According to the Aspen Institute, soccer has become one of the top two or three sports for American children aged six to twelve. Teen participation grew by nearly 600,000 players in 2023 alone.
Youth tackle football, by contrast, continues its steady decline as concussion concerns drive parents toward safer alternatives. And with Latino youth—who are culturally anchored to soccer—now representing a full third of the under-18 population, the generational foundation of the sport is undeniable. Baseball, still beloved and iconic, faces a demographic challenge: its average television viewer is almost sixty years old, and youth participation has plateaued for more than a decade.
Soccer’s audience is the youngest and fastest-growing of any major U.S. sport. The next generation is not shifting from baseball to soccer—they are simply starting with soccer.
Technology, meanwhile, is amplifying soccer’s rise. The sport is perfectly engineered for the streaming era: matches run ninety minutes rather than three hours, storylines unfold year-round, and short-form highlights dominate TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Younger audiences gravitate toward globally resonant content, and soccer is the most global entertainment product on the planet.
This is why tech giants are rewriting the economics of the sport—Apple’s $2.5 billion MLS rights deal, Amazon’s $60 million-per-year investment in the NWSL, YouTube’s acceleration of global football channels. Streaming platforms do not chase nostalgia; they chase engagement curves. And soccer’s curve is exponential.
Private equity’s behavior is even more telling. Institutional capital rarely moves without long-term conviction, yet PE firms are now deeply embedded not only in American soccer but also in European football—the financial prototype for a global sports economy. In the U.S., MLS club valuations average nearly $700 million, with multiple teams exceeding $1 billion. NWSL expansion fees have soared from a few million dollars in 2020 to more than $50 million today.
In Europe, Apollo Global Management’s acquisition of a majority stake in Atlético de Madrid—valuing the club at more than €2 billion—signals the new era. Apollo’s $5 billion sports investment fund is only one piece of a larger surge, with Silver Lake, RedBird, Ares, 777 Partners, Elliott Management, and others acquiring clubs across England, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. Since 2016, more than €10 billion of private equity capital has flowed into European football, turning the sport into a global institutional asset class.
European football provides the blueprint: heavy investment in infrastructure, global brands, year-round monetization, and cross-border scalability. U.S. soccer is following the same trajectory—but with far more growth room ahead.
And then comes 2026. Just as the 1994 World Cup catalyzed the birth of MLS, the 2026 World Cup—hosted by the U.S. alongside Canada and Mexico—will transform soccer’s cultural and economic standing permanently. An estimated 154 million Americans will engage with the tournament.
Forty-eight teams will compete across 104 matches in eleven American cities. It will be the first streaming-native World Cup in history, with billions of viewers connecting through social platforms and AI-enhanced content ecosystems. Everything U.S. soccer has built over the past three decades will be amplified tenfold when the world arrives.
Looking ahead, the convergence of demographics, media habits, investment flows, and global cultural trends points toward an unmistakable trajectory.
By 2028, soccer is likely to surpass baseball among Americans aged eighteen to forty—a shift already visible on youth fields and in streaming patterns.
By 2030 to 2032, the combined attendance of MLS, NWSL, and USL is on track to rival or even exceed that of Major League Baseball.
And by roughly 2032 to 2035, soccer will almost certainly emerge as the third most popular sport in the United States, behind only the NFL and basketball. What once sounded improbable now appears simply logical—the natural outcome of powerful structural forces all pushing in the same direction.
In the end, soccer is rising because humans still do. In an age when AI can replicate almost everything except the essence of human passion, the sport feels not only resilient but perfectly timed.
On the sidelines of Germantown, you can see what the data tells us: America’s youth, its families, its demographics, its media ecosystem, its capital markets, and its global connections are converging around the world’s most universal game.
AI may change how we work. But soccer is changing how we gather, how we identify, and how we feel.
In a world where algorithms can automate tasks, optimize workflows, and generate infinite streams of content, soccer remains one of the last arenas where inefficiency, irrationality, and emotion are not just tolerated—they are essential.
AI can automate almost everything. But it cannot automate the human heart.
And that is why soccer is becoming America’s next great sport.