Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?(natesilver.net) |
Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?(natesilver.net) |
Yes, it’s possible that it’s a “me” problem.
90 minutes of kicking the ball back and forth across the pitch that feels too large for the task at hand, occasionally scoring, only to end up with what amounts to a pretty low scoring game. It’s just hard to watch, it seems to move so much slower than I can handle.
If it works for others, that’s awesome; any sport that has the potential to bring many people together is a great thing.
But the low scoring is actually one of the most important things in soccer.
A goal in soccer is so much more precious than in any other sport. It can win you the game, as almost a third of games have one or less goals in the game. So the euphoria when the team scores outweigh any "boringness" that preceded it. It can only be compared to a sudden death win in hockey (another relatively low scoring game, though a not as low as soccer).
Those not into soccer don't really understand this, and many have tried to increase the number of goals scored. But it doesn't make the game better. An 8-2 score is much more boring than a 2-0 game, as the nerve is there all game.
Once you get familiar with it, it becomes an anticipation game. And you on the stand usually as a better view of a play than the players. So while there’s only passing going on, you start to sense the strategy shifts. And you may even think it’s either doomed or have a high chance of success, but the opposite happens.
A goal is the reward for high amount work, not a foregone conclusion. That’s what makes a penalty so painful.
But I guess it is hard to do that later in life, if you did not grow up in a football (soccer) culture, maybe playing recreationally as a boy, and avidly following the game.
However, it seems that these two players both play for PSV Eindhoven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergi%C3%B1o_Dest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Pepi And also these two players both play for Borussia Mönchengladbach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Reyna
Is the article wrong? This is the only claim I bothered to check. Should I assume the rest is wrong, too?
Sports are artifacts of culture. Although the US does remarkably well in soccer despite soccer not being a mainstay of american culture. The question should be, how come the US does so well in soccer, despite it still being a niche sport (even then mostly for older generations).
Soccer is much more popular with gen-alpha and to an extent gen-z (thank youtube).
A lot of the top national teams have players that play in the premier league or some other european league. The American national team (last i recall, haven't kept up) typically only play in the MLS where even then the foreign players treat it as a last stop before retirement when they do have premier league experience.
iron sharpens iron, competition is what it's all about, year round. I wonder why the premier league didn't expand to the US, Canada and beyond? it has global popularity but with not logistical or technical inhibitions, it still is a europe only (keep in mind, europe is still a bunch of countries, so international) club. There aren't enough matches to make a 1-2 6-8 hour international flights a week that big of a deal (assuming a day of recovery afterwards), and/or matches can be scheduled so that they move to one side of the atlantic after a few weeks and back after a few more instead of lots of back and forth.
I would say the NFL and the NBA dominate US culture, but today, the MLS and NHL are about the same level with younger generations as soccer -- if you include all of soccer as one thing instead of just the MLS.
Cavalry was never that important in the military experiences of Americans since its founding a mere 250 years ago, whereas lots of folks served in the infantry — Civil War through WWII. The US, moreover, is essentially a 20th Century country; infantry, tanks, air forces, etc. is 20th Century warfare; and American football echoes those 20th Century technologies.
The romantic ideal and practical effectiveness of cavalry over many centuries, ending in the 20th Century/WWI, made it much more deeply ingrained in the European (Old World) psyche. Soccer is cavalry, thus Europe and past colonies gravitated towards it.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/sport/uswnt-success-histo...
That's one of the answers: it's seen as a "women's" sport mostly. In school boys play football and girls play soccer in rough general terms. And because football, basketball, baseball is already there there just isn't much demand for another "ball" sport to care about so to speak.
A men's and women's sport that can be played with the same facilities is an economic plus -- college soccer is a great way to have fun supporting your school. It's a very different situation than field hockey, which is almost exclusively a woman's sport in the US although it is a huge men's sport in India and many other countries.
I’ve never heard that, in fact there are more boys who play in America than girls.
Another reason is that the best American athletes will go to the sport that pays the most and soccer is on the bottom of that list.
The fake flopping happens sometimes, but overall it hardly detracts from the game. It would be like me saying false starts is why I don't watch the 100 m dash.
And I'd be wary of thinking a fall is fake when the referee and the linesmen who are actually on the field think otherwise. Note that soccer is mostly not supposed to be a physical contact game. It was much more like that up to the 1070s. In fact, the infamous and relentless fouling of Pelé in the 1966 World Cup was a major catalyst for the creation of the red and yellow card system.
If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.
Or we have two other sports that are totally different.
Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.
Even if it's directionally correct, the point made further up in the thread is very important: basketball players aren't a different population from soccer players at age 14, when they need to pick something to be serious about if they are going to end up in the big leagues. Lots of them choose basketball, turn out not big enough, but would have been perfectly fine in soccer.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1btj60p/oc...
Lots of 6'4" players, though, which is comfortably tall enough for professional basketball.
https://www.zonalsports.com/ranking/tallest-premier-league-p...
I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries.
In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many boys are playing once or twice every day, in an unstructured format, during recess and after school.
Starting from a young age, Europeans who show talent are getting drafted into soccer academies before they're 10, greatly increasing the amount of competitive play. But this is on top of the everyday soccer they're playing.
For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." A local league costs money. A private high school with a good program costs money. In Europe, beyond (again) the continuous unstructured play, the academies and farm teams are free.
Finally, a good European player doesn't usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18.
Meanwhile, a gifted US soccer player heads to college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season, and four years later might get on one of the relatively few club teams.
So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly.
One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol.
Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference.
Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.
I think a core issue is that US and Mexican teams rarely have an opportunity to compete against teams significantly better than themselves. Furthermore, structural constraints within both leagues limit the amount of talent separation that can occur between teams, so it looks a bit like being stuck in a local minima in terms of talent development.
I think this is why it became so popular in India etc.
And sprinkle in some cultural differences (soccer is not that popular in the USA, so it's self-reinforcing).
My guess is that less than 5% of european soccer players ever set a foot in College, at least in the biggest Leagues (UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany). I only know two: Lampard and Iniesta. There might be a few more, but they are oddities.
If anything, a good player and good student usually has to make a choice at 18 years old: "am I good enough to bet my future on being a pro player and delay/abandon the College, or do I give up on being pro and focus on studying?"
Soccer has major competition in the US.
Because these sports started in America too, America usually dominates them.
It appears the sports industry in US skewed local preferences toward hardware-intensive sports, that sell lots of gear. Poor children can start playing soccer stuffing crumpled paper in plastic bags to create a makeshift ball, and using spaced sandals as makeshift goalposts. Minimal hardware requirements. It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera. Basketball comes closer to soccer in this regard.
It’s extremely hard to get good at chess. It’s extremely hard to get good at math. It’s extremely hard to get good at gymnastics. It’s extremely hard to get good at Piano.
Meanwhile, in China or Russia, there are dedicated schools for mass producing concert, pianist, etc.
wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?
Also, now with NIL etc, college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league
Varsity soccer season in the US is usually just four months, August-November.
Spring season (with no games) is February-April. During that season, NCAA places strict limitations on how often teams can practice: Division I and II teams are allowed only up to 8 hours per week, with just 4 of those being coach-supervised! [1]
Finally there is no organized playing for all of January, May, June and July.
So even for a player in a D1 team, they are training much, much less of the year than a 15-year-old on a farm team in Europe.
1. https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fal...
So if you even smell a college varsity team, you are already in the slow track. It's really rare to find a star that wasn't at least in a farm team at 15. I have a friend that was already there at 10, and his ceiling was just starter in a low tier team in La Liga.
Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.
I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.
Maybe the only parallel to soccer I can think of is sports like Rugby in UK and some English-speaking countries, Cricket in India, and some sports endemic to countries (such as GAA in Ireland).
The best way to compare the US to other countries in a sport that is similar in terms of interest among other countries is something like Volleyball. Which the US tends to be very good at, with many major competitors. I can't think of anywhere that volleyball is a #1 sport that sees a lot of unstructured play.
All this was obviously about team sports.
The USA women's team is world class, probably for this reason.
In the UK boys mostly play soccer while girls traditionally played netball (basketball).
This is true for most sports (and activities) in the US. Additionally, the US doesn't have the concept of unstructured play, as many (most?) kids are fully depend on the parent or the school to take them places, since most of the US is so car-dependent.
For France, their sporting renaissance, if we can call it that, started way earlier in the late 1960s with what we'd call "DEI" today: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/24/state-...
For Spain, correctly focusing on developing in-game intelligence and skill was key in out-competing stronger & taller teams (at a time when rapidly improving football pitches were proving great for playing positional & possession-based game): A very 1970s Dutch way of playing kick-started by Johan Cruyff in 1990s at Barcelona, and converted into concrete results for the national team by Luis Aragones & Vincente del Bosque in 2000s/2010s: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/05/11/the-revolution-that...
The closest thing to that in the U.S. is kids playing basketball in Brooklyn or L.A.
The majority of soccer we played as kids wasn't even on a pitch. If you had a wall, a football, and two objects (usually jackets) to mark the goal - you could play - and that's exactly what we did.
But yeah, small neighborhood pitches were usually easy to find.
You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.
Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.
American men gotta find their own way to become a world class soccer player. There's no pipeline like their is for the big 4. It's harder for teammates to gel when some went through the ranks in Germany, some in England, some in Italy and have only a few weeks with a new coach to buy into the system.
America's biggest rivals also aren't very good. So while the best European and South American teams constantly have to play each other and fight for survival, the US has to play middling teams like Mexico and Canada and tiny Central American and island nations.
Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business.
This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.
In the absence of a ball, we’d dislodge the plastic ball from a roll on deodorant packaging and play with that, or a table football ball (which hurt a lot).
Then - in my late teens - studying in the UK football (soccer) was also predominant, played during breaks etc.
My point being that the US is along other large nations such as India, China which culturally favour other games/sports.
Contrast these nations with Uruguay for example, tiny country… has won the World Cup. I do not know this, but I’d hazard a guess that soccer is THE game in the streets of Uruguay.
>unprecedented levels of gambling
Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings
>insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football
Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe
>corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics
Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music.
>fan violence inside and outside the stadiums
This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that
Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.
Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.
Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.
In the US, you have some special factors:
- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.
- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.
- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.
On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.
So I don't think it is just about organization, investment, etc. Probably the biggest is simply the attachment to the sport among ordinary youngsters in unsupervised play.
But would you say the same about the basketball where the US is dominating both the men and woment tournaments?
It's that simple.
As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great.
Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.
No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it.
Different sports.
(I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)
The clear logic behind soccer is low barrier of entry. A vacant lot, some friends and a makeshift ball gets any child started. Even the poor can play it with minimal inputs.
Why isn't U.S. better at Field hockey, Badminton, Cricket, Ping pong etc.?
Ideally a capitalistic system is supposed to produce the best or close to the best in each category to stay competitive then what gives?
Capitalism produces the "best" in categories where there is a high demand for a product. In the U.S., the demand is for high-scoring, high-production-value entertainment. This is closely entwined with "culture".
This is why the U.S. leads in sports that are tailored for television and massive stadium revenue. Sports that are more nuanced, low-scoring, or lack a domestic TV or the US cultural zeigeist simply cannot compete for the attention span of the American consumer, and by extension, the capital that follows that attention.
For basketball and American football, those sports weren't exactly blockbusters either. The rules and strategies of those games have been carefully tailored over the years to cater to action and scoring, something that was never going happen to the rules (or laws) of soccer.
What part of American football or baseball is high-scoring or high-production-value or entertaining?
The best softball teams were the MBA and law students, who were mostly American.
But physics absolutely mopped up in soccer.
Conversely, the NWSL is likely the most lucrative league for women besides the WNBA. In both cases, it's a legit pipeline from college to the pros. Women's hockey is similar. So you have a group of players who know each other, have been playing together for a while and were roughly trained the same way. Also, the second best women's soccer team happens to be in their "division".
They can come together as a team better than American men who all went through different training programs from youth.
I'm from Spain and living in Mexico. Football in these countries is almost like a religion.
And then, right at a child's age where European scouts are noticing kids over there, in China parents are hit with massive, massive pressure to help their kids academically as best they can. Good middle school -> good high school -> good university -> good job. Unless your kid is far and away a natural talent easily exceeding their peers, you're going to hesitate to let them devote more time to professionally developing athletic ability. Athletic competition at the highest levels in China is intense due to the number of natural talents you get in a large population, and with every year that goes by without your kid quite making it into the professional-athlete track, the pressure gets higher to abandon that track and focus on academics.
So the athletic practice, even for a quite promising kid, gets sidelined for more study time and after-school classes. And this happens even for kids with parents who want them to have a balanced life without the insane pressure for academics the Chinese school system is known for. For those families it just takes the shape of cutting back the athletic practice instead of nurturing it to a possibly professional level.
One other factor that I can think of is just a culture of family interest. I don't know any Chinese men older than 45 who are into watching sports at all, whereas in the West (and also India, I think?) it's common for a family interest in sports to have already existed for generations. I do know Chinese men my age (31) who are into basketball and have young kids who might grow up with that interest. That's all anecdotal, I know, but my sample is big enough for it to be surprising to me in comparison to other places.
Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.
Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.
I grew up in a European (Holland) country and as boys we'd play soccer all the time, during school on the schoolyard, after school, in the evening and the vast majority of boys in my class joined the local soccer team (me included). Even though we were a local team in a small village, scouts of slightly more important teams would sometimes come to our matches.
Basically, because soccer is so ingrained in our culture, virtually all boys play soccer at some point. That combined with all the clubs that play at different levels, and the scouting network, virtually no talent is missed.
Put differently, when a new Cruyff or Robben is born, there is a high probability that he will be found.
Women's soccer is really a different story. It has only started to take off in recent years and at least as many girls seem to play hockey.
Of course, it should be said that the only sport that really matters is Korfbal/Korfball :).
You need to look at what sports an eight-year-old is playing in the backyard, what sports his Dad is excited about on the TV.
An agile, fast, coordinated kid who's coachable and wants to train hard but is going to grow up to be 5' 8" is not going to make the NFL or the NBA, but if they've got the athleticism to play in the World Cup... well, in the US that kid will be the point guard on the local high school basketball team and also play safety and wide receiver on the football team.
In India, they'd be a cricket star.
There are soccer academies in the US but it is still relatively new and we do not have a great development model yet. Youth academies are also fairly antithetical to how talent pipelines work for the established US sports.
It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular, except they already have soccer plus even basketball is growing quicker.
In America, soccer just isn’t that popular and there are so many other sports that people currently care about more.
Football in England is sometimes demonized by the media, but specifically footballers. Footballers have historically been the punching bag of the low brow media. "Rio Ferdinand on 150k a week does something bad". "Wayne Rooney caught in latest scandal, 200k a week ace in shambles" etc etc. They love to mention how much they earn, but they never talk about how football is one of the very remaining professions which are purely meritocratic. The few professions where talent is enough and offers social mobility. Most footballers are working class and yet they're blamed, and football is blamed too.
But what's so bad about something that brings people together to bond over a game? Hooligan violence isn't really a thing anymore. Gambling is a separate issue. It's not football's fault that people like to gamble. The politicians could make it illegal.
I think the real mystery is, how come Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay play so much better than what you would expect from relatively poor countries?
My guess is that their leagues are fairly developed industries, like you would expect in the first world.
I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s. The oldest Brazilian and Argentina clubs date back to the 1900s.
Teams like Atlante and América were founded in 1916.
Beaten-to-death takes about baseball and athleticism aside, if a kid shows potential there it's a great path to follow:
- some of the highest individual salaries and (to date) least restrictions on team spending
- it's very very very easy for individual talent to stand out at basically every position; this can be harder in football and various levels especially for non-QB positions
But once you're on the baseball path you're not gonna be training a skillset that would have much overlap with a soccer skillset.
This includes college football and basketball, which are part of the career path for those sports.
Women's soccer is relatively popular, however.
This is untrue and also just silly. The talent pools for horse jockeys and NBA players don't overlap. The talent pool for soccer and football is probably 90% overlap. Smaller players are certainly more likely to be successful in soccer than football but tall players can do great in soccer and average height guys can do well in football.
> And baseball is the old man’s game that does not require any athleticism at all.
Come on. Baseball doesn't demand the same athleticism as soccer but these guys are still elite athletes and there are plenty of stories of both MLB and NFL offering positions to the same players.
A natural cornerback isn't going to be "quicker and faster" over that many miles without a different kind of conditioning that probably favors different genetics. That said, I do think the game would translate well for some cornerbacks in some roles.
When we are talking about the really TOP elite of football those kids get into it at age 5. From that age on every day consists of hours of football. There are scouts looking at prepubescent kids all over the world ready to sign them.
In a hypothetical world where every kid plays only soccer, every potentially great soccer player has been practicing the sport from an early age. In a world with 10 competing sports, some potentially great soccer players might have be playing baseball or basketball from a young age up into their late teens.
Baseball is a hardware-intensive sport. It's hard to get popular in poorer countries. Soccer on the other side demands just a vacant lot and some soft round object you can kick around to get started.
Basketball is growing in Brazil a lot and that’s kind of expensive.
Skateboarding has become massive in Brazil and that’s even more expensive than soccer and every person needs their own skateboard, unlike soccer where you can pool your money to share 1 ball.
Idk what you are talking about, you don’t need fancy equipment to play most sports with your friends. Most of the time, it’s having the idea is the issue.
Edit: typos
I don't think this means as much as you're putting weight into.
I think the fact that somebody like MJ or Tim Tebow could even get a try-out in a different profession sports really speaks to top level talent being fungible. Like just imagine somebody practices being a Doctor for 20+ years and then gets an interview to be a World Cup Referee. Sure, they might not succeed at the other sport but the fact they can still do it is I think proof of sports fungibility.
I think there is a more self selection process happening for athletes and sports. People with natural athletic inclinations try lots of sports young, they will do well in the ones they are most suited for, and begin taking that seriously.
No other country can like a sport this boring.
Basketball is the obvious one you're leaving out that's about the same age as Volleyball (itself a US team sport), and probably has the most international popularity -- especially if just going by people-counting since China alone is an enormous market.
Funny thing, though: US players make up about 73% of the MLB but about 78% of the NBA, despite the NBA having more international popularity, and the current best players in both being from non-US countries.
Go to places where you find good Basketball players. Germany, former Yugoslavian countries, Spain, Argentina... All those places are primarily Football countries.
You will find a few people interested in the sport, some youngster might be playing it for fun, but still very much behind football.
It's just not comparable.
But... so? I thought we were talking about if these sports had "nearly no popularity"? Not if they were displacing soccer entirely. "Nearly no popularity" is pretty obviously false based on eyeballs and sales, even if soccer is more popular... And there's a lot more countries and people in the world than just Europe. (But also very American of you to ignore them ;) .) How much would it even matter to the NBA if China is or isn't primarily a basketball country, or just a country with hundreds of millions of fans that also have another sport above it in their personal rankings, if they're making money either way?
EDIT: and of course the name "soccer" originated in England because there were multiple foot-related games and so people made a more specific name. So maybe the weird countries are the ones that lost a fun multi-sport ecosystem and ended up a monoculture...
Why would I bother talking to you about Bundesliga, Champions League, Libertadores Cup or whatever else?
Also, I worked with many people from Eastern Europe. Apart from Lithuania, I think all other countries are interested in Football more than in Basketball.