Soccer’s One-Point Pass Over Baseball Is Not Settled

Soccer passed baseball as Americans’ third-favorite sport in a late-2024 Ampere Analysis survey, 10 percent to 9 percent. American football still led at 36 percent, with basketball at 17 percent.

Gallup’s first reading after the 2026 World Cup, taken Aug. 3-24 among all adults, put baseball at 10 percent and soccer at 9 percent. The one-point crossing that drove January headlines has not shown up as a settled changing of the guard.

Ampere Put Soccer Third by a Single Point

Ampere, a research firm, asked which sport people named as their favorite in the fourth quarter of 2024. Soccer’s 10 percent edged baseball’s 9 percent, with ice hockey at 4 percent, tennis at 3 percent, boxing/MMA at 3 percent, and golf at 2 percent.

The same research still had soccer as the country’s fourth-most followed sport, behind American football, basketball, and baseball. Favorite and followed are different counts. Soccer had more people willing to pick it first. Baseball still had more people who followed the sport at all.

Daniel Monaghan of Ampere pointed to the money underneath that split. Spending on soccer media rights in the United States has risen four-fold in the past decade and now exceeds spending on baseball rights, he said, because soccer fans pay for the English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, and other foreign leagues, while baseball fans concentrate on Major League Baseball. America was the single most valuable territory at the 2022 World Cup, accounting for 15 percent of total rights spending, and it has become the biggest foreign market for the four largest European leagues.

Gallup’s August Poll Still Puts Baseball Ahead

Jeffrey M. Jones of Gallup reported the August figures on Sept. 9, 2026. Football remained first, though the 31 percent who named it was the lowest share since 2001. Basketball stood at 11 percent, baseball at 10 percent, and soccer at 9 percent, the highest Gallup has recorded and 2 points above its 2017 mark of 7 percent.

TWO POLLS, TWO VERDICTS ON THIRD PLACE

The two rows are not a correction of the same poll. Ampere’s snapshot predated a home World Cup. Gallup’s open-ended question went to all adults in the weeks after it, and 31 percent named football their favorite even in an August field period, when football usually polls softer than it does in the fall.

Gallup has found that, since 1972, an average of 38 percent name football during football season (September through January) against 32 percent outside it. The new 31 percent still sits below that out-of-season average. Soccer’s 9 percent arrived in the afterglow of a tournament on home soil. Jones treated that as an open question, not a lock.

Football remains Americans’ favorite sport to watch, by a wide margin, although the 31% who name it as their favorite is the lowest since 2001.

Meanwhile, 9% of Americans identify soccer as their favorite sport, the highest Gallup has measured by two percentage points. Soccer… pic.twitter.com/BKLLgRAECn

— Gallup (@Gallup) September 9, 2026

How Football Took the Top Spot in 1972

A one-point pass is not how American spectator rankings have actually flipped. When Gallup first asked the favorite-sport question in 1937, baseball led at 34 percent and football sat at 23 percent. Baseball still led in 1960, 34 percent to 21 percent.

The next reading, in 1972, reversed the order: football 38 percent, baseball 19 percent. That was a 19-point gap on the day football took the top, after football had risen 17 points and baseball had fallen 15 points from the 1960 survey. Football has led for 54 years across 23 Gallup measurements. Its share has ranged from 28 percent in 1985 and 2001 to 43 percent in 2006 and 2007.

HOW AMERICANS NAMED A FAVORITE SPORT

1. 1937: Baseball leads at 34 percent, football at 23 percent, in Gallup’s first favorite-sport reading.
2. 1960: Baseball still leads, 34 percent to football’s 21 percent.
3. 1972: Football takes the top at 38 percent; baseball falls to 19 percent and never returns to first.
4. 2017: Soccer reaches 7 percent, then Gallup’s high for the sport, after decades at 2 percent or less.
5. December 2023: Football is at 41 percent, baseball 10 percent, basketball 9 percent, and soccer at 5 percent in a mid-season football poll.
6. August 2026: Football 31 percent, basketball 11 percent, baseball 10 percent, soccer 9 percent, in Gallup’s first poll after a U.S.-hosted World Cup.

After 1972, baseball held second place into the mid-1990s, averaging 18 percent in that stretch. It has averaged 12 percent since, including 10 percent in Gallup’s past three surveys. Soccer never exceeded 2 percent before 2005 and was under 1 percent until 1981. The long slide in baseball, and the slow climb in soccer, are the pattern. The 10-9 Ampere reading is a snapshot on top of that pattern, not a 1972-scale reversal.

Record World Cup Audiences Did Not Crown a New No. 3

The men’s tournament opened on June 11, 2026, as a 48-team field across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time in the final on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on a 106th-minute goal by Ferran Torres, in front of 80,663 people.

Fox’s English-language telecast of that final averaged 38,937,000 viewers and peaked at 51,685,000 from 5:45 to 6 p.m. ET, a 132 percent increase from the 16.784 million who watched the 2022 final on Fox. Telemundo and Peacock added 23.9 million for the Spanish-language coverage, a combined U.S. audience of 62.8 million.

THE WORLD CUP ON U.S. TELEVISION

• Fox final: 38,937,000 average viewers, 51,685,000 at the peak window.
• Spanish-language add: 23.9 million on Telemundo and Peacock, 62.8 million combined.
• Stadiums: 6.66 million fans through 102 matches, 65,351 per game, 99.7 percent occupancy, per FIFA before the last two games.
• Fan share after: Morning Consult, in a September poll, found 46 percent of U.S. adults said they were soccer fans, 10 points higher than a similar reading in May.

Those are event numbers. They show a country that will watch soccer when the world’s best are on free broadcast television in July. They do not, by themselves, move Gallup’s open-ended favorite-sport question past baseball. A Morning Consult bump in people willing to call themselves fans can sit beside a Gallup reading in which baseball still leads soccer by a point.

The Age Split That Baseball Cannot Close

YouGov, in a July 7-9 poll of 1,099 U.S. adult citizens taken while the World Cup was still on, did not ask for a single favorite. It forced pairwise choices among football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and hockey.

Football still won every pairing: 65 percent preferred it to basketball, 69 percent to baseball, 71 percent to soccer, and 76 percent to hockey. Baseball and basketball were close, 48 percent to 52 percent. Soccer beat hockey, 54 percent to 46 percent.

The age cut is the part baseball cannot talk around. 61 percent of younger adults preferred soccer to baseball, and 66 percent preferred soccer to hockey. Among adults 45 and older, 74 percent preferred baseball to soccer and 61 percent preferred baseball to basketball.

HEAD-TO-HEAD CHOICES IN JULY

• Younger adults: 61 percent take soccer over baseball; views on basketball are close, 46 percent soccer to 54 percent basketball.
• Adults 45 and older: 74 percent take baseball over soccer; 61 percent take baseball over basketball.
• Hispanic adults: 56 percent prefer soccer to baseball, 67 percent prefer soccer to hockey.
• White adults: 64 percent prefer baseball to soccer.

Gallup’s August age split rhymes with that. Among adults 18 to 34, 20 percent named football, about 10 percent each named basketball, baseball, or soccer, and 23 percent named no favorite sport. Football’s hold grew with age: 30 percent among 35-to-54-year-olds and 38 percent among those 55 and older. Lower-income adults were the most likely to name soccer, at 13 percent. Jones noted that soccer’s Gallup strength is driven largely by Hispanic Americans, basketball’s by Black Americans, and football’s by White adults.

In the December 2023 Gallup poll, young adults had already been cooler on football (28 percent) and warmer on soccer (8 percent) than on baseball (5 percent). Older adults, those 65 and up, were three times as likely as the youngest to name baseball, 16 percent to 5 percent. The World Cup did not invent that split. It arrived on top of it.

Thirty MLS Clubs Now Span the U.S. and Canada

Major League Soccer was founded in 1993 as part of the United States’ commitment to hosting the 1994 World Cup, played its first season in 1996, and has grown from 10 teams to 30. On Sept. 17, 2026, the league published roster profiles for all 30 MLS clubs after the secondary transfer window, a paper snapshot of a league that now stretches from Vancouver to Miami and from Seattle to Montreal.

That expansion is the institutional half of soccer’s climb: more clubs, more local broadcasts, more academy sides, more nights when a U.S. city has a first-division match. It is also why a favorite-sport poll can move a point without baseball’s television universe collapsing. MLB still concentrates a national pastime’s worth of followers on one league. Soccer’s U.S. audience is split across MLS, the Premier League, Liga MX, and the national teams, which is exactly the structure Monaghan said was inflating soccer’s rights bill past baseball’s.

The next on-field test is ordinary. Each of the 30 clubs plays a 34-match regular season, and the top nine in each conference go to the MLS Cup Playoffs in November. A World Cup hangover either shows up in those buildings or it does not.

No Favorite Sport Outpolls Basketball, Baseball and Soccer

The second-place answer in Gallup’s August poll was not basketball. It was no sport at all. 20 percent of adults said they did not have a favorite sport, the highest share in Gallup’s trend, ahead of basketball at 11 percent, baseball at 10 percent, and soccer at 9 percent. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, that no-favorite group was 23 percent, larger than football’s 20 percent in the same age band.

A country in which one adult in five will not name a sport is not converting from baseball to soccer in a straight line. It is spreading. Football still leads every demographic Gallup published, but 20 percent of young adults now pick it, against 38 percent of those 55 and older. The rest of the young sample splits into small piles: basketball, baseball, soccer, other sports, and a larger pile that shrugs.

A key question about soccer is whether it can sustain this new high level in the coming years, or whether the boost was temporarily driven by excitement over the U.S. hosting this year’s World Cup.

Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup

That is the honest remainder after a home World Cup, a 62.8 million-viewer final, a 30-club league, and two polls that still cannot agree which sport is third. Ampere’s 10-9 reading among favorites was real. Gallup’s 10-9 reading the other way, six weeks after the final, was real too. Baseball has been losing this argument since 1972. Soccer has not yet won it by the margin football once did.

MLS opens its playoffs in November. Gallup’s next favorite-sport reading will land in a year with no men’s World Cup on the calendar. That is the comparison the 1972 overtake eventually had to survive, and the one this one-point pass still has to meet.