Soccer has caught on in the states.

The number one sport in the US is American football. The number one league in the world is the NFL, no other league comes close. Yes soccer is the number one sport in the world but that is collectively across hundreds of leagues.

Number two and three sports in the US are a tie between basketball and baseball.

Number four is College Football.

Number five is Ice Hockey

Number six is soccer.

Soccer isn’t NFL successful but neither is anything else is. The MLS is very successful. It is ranked the tenth most successful soccer league in the world.

Also Tennis is huge in the US. The US Open is one of the four major tournaments in the world …

IMO, professional soccer in the US is way behind because it’s less TV friendly. No commercial breaks (other than halftime) means less money coming into the sport than more commercialized competition.

At youth levels, it’s one of the most played sports in the country. Then as soccer-playing American kids get further in their “career”, they get pushed toward other sports where more money is. Colleges rake in cash on football and basketball, and lots of these kids play multiple sports until a coach makes them choose.

I can very slightly speak to this. But like from a beer league, geriatric sort if way. I play indoor soccer, but I also did pickup football games when I was a teenager. I am old now. Like middle aged I guess. As is most of my team. (1970’s baby’s). We are a very average team in our division. In a ten week season we typically win 5 or 6 games. Sometimes only two or three.

A couple sessions ago a team of similar aged football players made an indoor soccer team. They were larger than everyone, chopped everyone down, physically won most 1v1 battles. However, we obliterated them. Like 9-3 one game 11-4 another. We just kept passing around and they kept running at 10/10ths until they were gassed.

Now when I was playing football, you would only play me at RB or WR. Fast, quick yes. But a linebacker would wreck me. Build a whole team of guys like me and, well likely strip sacks on most plays. Diversity of si, R in the NFL is hard to see on TV, but offensive linemen are like 330lbs. Some wrs are like 180lbs. You don’t see that variance in soccer.

In short. The sports aren’t comparable.

Well, I’d say that tennis did catch on. Ashe, McEnroe, Agassi, Sampras, the Williams sisters, Billie Jean King, Evert; they all had major followings as pros. It’s also a very popular sport to play at all levels of skill. It does have ups and downs, but in terms of pros, it’s a pretty consistent sport to be able to make a living at, which isn’t true of very many single player sports that aren’t fighting.

Soccer, yeah, it’s way behind in terms of draw. There’s a shit ton of opinions about why that is, but I’ve never really put any time into considering them because I’m not a team sports guy at all, and soccer/futbol is low on the list of what I’ll sit and watch for any period of time even when I’m in that mood.

As far as the thought experiment of pitting the players against each other, you’d run into three conflicting training and selection paradigms. I dunno if you’ve ever played both, but holy fuck do they take different bodies to do well at.

Even a running back or wide receiver is going to out mass most Soccer players, and most Soccer players would have trouble with the extra gear even if they didn’t get tackled. So you run into each sport being dominated by people that are physically less capable at the other one at pro levels. At amateur levels, that isn’t as drastic, but you’d see the players from the other sport gassing out early.

Besides, the argument about which sport is “better” has nothing to do with the players. They’re all peak level athletes in the pros, so that’s not relevant. People will argue about it, but people are mostly idiots that will argue whether vanilla is better than chocolate just because they think whatever opinion they hold is superior even when there’s no competition in the first place (they’re entirely different things, not opposites).

I’m not dogging on soccer players at all, takes some real stamina and conditioning to do what they do… but if you put them on the field with even the worst NFL team, someone is gonna get hurt. Most people don’t realize just how powerful even the average NFL player is… then you put them up against someone like Ray Lewis (picking retired player to avoid favorites) it’s going to end bad.

To put it in simpler terms, it’s like asking why we don’t see which boat does better in the Indy 500?

Edit: I missed the second half of your question, but I also believe most NFL athletes would have the conditioning and stamina to at the very least compete in a soccer match.

Tennis has kind of a snotty reputation besides being slow and boring. Surprises me that it’s still fairly popular. Ended up in Palm Springs the night before a big tennis tournament and almost had to drive on to LA. Everything was booked. Pickleball is crowding tennis but not getting rid of it. Ironically, if I make it through the US Open Pickleball lottery, I would have to play Ivan Lendl…the tennis player.

The NFL team would be miserable and probably have soft-tissue injuries, and eventually would not be able to stop the soccer players from navigating around them like cones, assuming they ever could. Assuming the soccer players could learn the byzantine rulebook in a reasonable timeframe, they would be instantly broken into little pieces and do nothing of note. No one would enjoy either contest, and we would learn nothing.

As for why they didn’t catch on, first I’m not so sure they didn’t, as tennis in particular has always had its place in the American culture, though its association with the “country club” class may have limited its ceiling. American soccer has its issues, and it is not pressuring the “traditional” American team sports, but attendances are healthy, sponsorships are good, and quality of play is decent, with a starting 11 being roughly comparable to the bottom half of the English second division. Roster rules would mean an MLS club would quickly get ground into dirt in that English second division, but matchday 1 might be pretty competitive. Taking your question more generously, though, competition from baseball, followed by organizational disarray, followed by competition from college gridiron football, followed by competition from professional gridiron football, accompanied by the “not invented here” syndrome, left it seen as a sport for immigrants and then as a safe yet cheap option for suburban children. Meanwhile ice hockey and basketball were also carving out their markets.

Televised World Cups and Pele started to erode that some, but more organizational disarray left the country without a proper professional league from 1984 until 1995, and when it was restarted it was intentionally done in a manner to control costs and favor management, which it ironically was able to do because it could always argue the players could seek employment in other countries.

Another thing might be that soccer is big now, a lot of millennials grew up playing and following soccer, but non us leagues are considered top dog. So if you watch soccer seriously, you’re watching premier league, bundesliga, serie a, la liga, ligue 1, etc instead

Can’t really speak to tennis, but the other stuff probably because watching a team score 0 points is kinda lame.

It starts young. I feel like only girls played soccer and tennis growing up lol. Boys definitely wanted to play football cuz it was “cooler.” And it WAS seen as the cooler sport lol always has been