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A soccer thought. I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport and us Americans are correct to not play it. However since it’s an inferior sports that’s also why you can have a World Cup.
Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate. You need to be a rich country to compete in American sports. For American football it’s probably only America that is richest enough to play it. It requires a huge amount of resources and technology to play at the highest levels. Even if the European powers played American football at the same rates I have my doubts they could create a team that’s competitive with a NFL team and we have 30 of them.
Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.
And since Soccer is a low event sports it means that inferior teams can actually pull out ties or wins against power house teams with the right luck.
Inferior to what? Team sports do not excite me usually, especially very long team sports (I barely have patience for basketball, anything longer is a nope, maybe highlights only). But I assume by "American sports" you mean egghand, which Americans insist to calling "football" to piss off Europeans (a noble goal, but doesn't make it make sense) and baseball? The latter is so boring that it should come with a warning label "may cause prolonged coma, do not attempt without medical supervision", while the former is more exciting, to the point it looks like a bar brawl but without the fun parts like alcohol and singing. Of these three, football (which Americans in line with the Good Ole England tradition long abandoned by the English call "soccer") is the most entertaining, and this is very well confirmed by the experience. Games like baseball or rugby exist everywhere, and they have some popularity, but you would find orders of magnitude more kids (or amateur adults) playing football than any of them. The market has passed its verdict.
I don’t believe the market has passed its verdict. There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first so a lot of its popularity is because people grew up with soccer.
But part of my argument for soccer being inferior would still fit in under your market test. Other countries are in fact poorer than America and soccer is cheaper to play and be internationally competitive than Americas leading sports. You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.
Actually soccer, rugby, and cricket spread out from England at about the same time, but soccer got the widest adoption and displaced the others, in both rich and poor countries alike. Rugby and its descendants(like American and Canadian football, or Australian rules football) are dominant in most anglosphere colonies, but not in Britain itself.
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