Why Americans are slow to catch on to soccer

Imagine yourself for a second a fan of the New York Yankees. You've grown up your whole life in America following "American" sports like baseball, basketball and football and maybe a little hockey (it's at least a North American sport). You are currently 25 or older, and in addition to following those sports you grew up playing them. So now someone says come watch a soccer game and you laugh in their face. You say it's a boring sport, 90 minutes of nothing. From your perspective you are absolutely correct.

The problem soccer encounters is that on its face it's a boring sport. All you do is kick a ball around for 90 minutes, occasionally there's a nice pass, someone shoots on goal and most of the time misses. If you're lucky you have a couple goals a game, but that's it. Sounds pretty boring to me. However it's all a matter of perspective. If you look at baseball all it is, is one guy throwing a ball to another for 3 hours or more. Most of the time the ball isn't even put in play and when it is most of the time it's an out. Even when you get hit most of those don't score, so other than the occasional run every few half innings, there's not a whole lot of action.

If you know baseball however, there's much more to it. When you know the players and follow a team closely, you're thinking along with the action. You're thinking about what pitch the pitcher should throw, whether the manager should put on a hit and run, pinch hit, bring in a new pitcher, etc. Plus you know on any pitch your team could hit or give up a home run that alters the course of the game.
Soccer is just the same, every pass matters, every tackle matters. All it takes is one quick pass or one player faking out another and there's a cross from the wing headed into the goal, and the game is completely changed. Even when the defense is just passing the ball around the back, one mistake and the other team is on goal.

Trust me I understand how people wouldn't like soccer, for the first 16 years of my life i never watched it or played it; in fact i thought i hated it. I watched the 2002 world cup and the American team (MY team) made a surprising run. Then i went and worked for an MLS team for two summers and i was following the team I worked for. All of a sudden i had a rooting interest and i started to see why soccer is a game that the rest of the world loves. If you have a rooting interest you will love it. Try betting on a soccer match before watching it, all of a sudden you'll have a reason to root for a team and it'll be much more interesting. The same goes for baseball, try watching a Royals-Orioles game that's being played in August when both teams are out of the race. You won't care who wins and you'll probably fall asleep midway through the 4th inning. Now try betting for one of the teams, and see if you aren't more interested. I'm not advocating betting on sports, i never do, it's illegal. However, decide to root for a team for whatever reason and all of a sudden you will understand the beauty of the "beautiful game" that is soccer.