The Man Who Made America Love Soccer Predicts NFL’s Days Are Numbered
Alan Rothenberg says soccer is set to overtake NFL as America’s No.1 sport. Cites MLS attendance, TV deals and 2026 World Cup impact.
“If our team had been an embarrassment, no matter how many tickets we sold...”
Alan Rothenberg, the man behind the 1994 World Cup, says soccer is set to overtake the NFL as America’s top sport. 32 years after running the tournament that made the U.S. take football seriously, he believes the sport is now firmly on that path.
When the U.S. hosted its first World Cup in 1994, Rothenberg recalls that much of the American media treated soccer with “disdain, if not contempt.”
The usual complaints got dragged out every time: dull, hardly any goals, just a sport the rest of the world cared about.
Now 87, Rothenberg smiles from his Beverly Hills home office as he looks back on how far soccer has come in the U.S. The country is getting ready to host most of next month’s World Cup matches.
Major League Soccer is booming with 30 teams and pulling in over 20,000 fans per game on average. That’s more than the average attendance for NBA games and NHL hockey.
The English Premier League and other top European leagues are now shown free-to-air on national TV in the U.S.
“Thirty years from now, I think will be challenging, if we have not already challenged, the NFL for prominence in this country,” Rothenberg said.
“I can't imagine the NFL going any higher and at some point they're going to plateau. Some of the injury issues are going to mount and there's going to be a slowdown at the same time soccer just keeps soaring.”
To back up his claim, Rothenberg points to his old school, the University of Michigan - a major force in college American football.
“When I was there and then for years afterwards, if you drove into Ann Arbor on empty fields, people would be tossing a football around,” Rothenberg said. “You drive in there today on those same fields, and they're kicking a soccer ball around."l//”
Rothenberg has documented soccer’s growth in America in his new memoir, The Big Bounce: The Surge that Shaped the Future of US Soccer. The book explores his time as one of the early pioneers of the sport in North America.
His soccer journey started in the 1960s when he helped manage the Los Angeles Wolves in the United Soccer Association. That league was a forerunner to the North American Soccer League.
Rothenberg later organized the highly successful soccer competition at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. It ended with France beating Brazil in front of 101,799 fans at the Pasadena Rose Bowl.
“I am confident that we'll get out of the group stage, how far after that depends on how much we develop, and who we end up playing,” he says of the 2026 squad's chances.
“But I'm not afraid of an embarrassment because the sport has legs now which it didn't have before. A great performance by our team will really boost the sport. But a sub-par performance isn't going to kill us.”
As CEO of the 1994 World Cup, Rothenberg ran a tournament that still holds the record for attendance. It averaged 68,991 fans per match, the highest in World Cup history.
Rothenberg says part of 1994’s success came from how well the U.S. team played. They shocked everyone by making it to the last 16, where they were knocked out by eventual winners Brazil.
“If our team had been an embarrassment, no matter how many tickets we sold, no matter how much money we ended up making, there would have been a dark cloud over this sport,” Rothenberg said.
Now, 32 years later, Rothenberg says there’s less pressure on the USA team to perform. That’s because soccer has a much stronger base in the country now.
Since 1994, the World Cup has grown from 24 teams to 48.
Rothenberg isn’t worried about quality dropping with a bigger tournament. In fact, he supports expanding it even more to 64 teams at future World Cups.
He argued that ditching group stages for a straight knockout format would make every match “life or death.”
“It's a radical proposal, but it would be good to look at,” Rothenberg said.
“Will there be some absolute blowouts? Yes. But are there going to be occasional Cinderella stories where some country, out of nowhere, scares the heck out of the number one seed, or even knocks them off? I think there'll be a level of excitement again.”
Rothenberg also claims that FIFA’s heavily criticized 2026 ticketing system, which has been widely panned by fan groups, will end up being “anything other than a media topic.”
The World Cup is back in LA! Last time it was here 32 years ago, Alan Rothenberg was running the show as U.S. Soccer Foundation president. ⚽️ 🇺🇸 @jaimemaggio asked the former MLS chairman about his new book “The Big Bounce” detailing soccer’s surge in America. @CBSLosAngeles pic.twitter.com/qVb47mntRA
— Sports Central LA (@SportsCentralLA) March 16, 2026
“In this country, we are accustomed to high prices and dynamic prices,” he says. “We've got people who are not wealthy people spending thousands of dollars to go to a Taylor Swift concert or a Bad Bunny concert. It reflects the true market.
“Will the pricing be out of the reach of certain numbers of people? Yes, but that's true, unfortunately, in a lot of things in society these days.”
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