MLS? Joking, right? People want major football not some lame minor league. The PL is covered by NBC and definitely will stay so La Liga, Serie A or Bundesliga are the leftovers.
MLS used to be pretty low in the rankings, sure, and it’s still no La Liga or Premiere League, players good enough to play in Europe probably don’t settle for MLS. But it is improving over all and is considered mid-tier these days. With the money investment from Apple, MLS could climb even higher in the rankings.
As for the other comments about soccer/hockey/baseball, US pro sports looks something like this: football vs basketball for #1 (football comes out on top usually, but basketball is a close second, and these positions may flip on a market by market basis), with regionally strong showings for baseball (likely 3rd place), hockey (4th), and soccer (5th). Market by market, basketball or football may be the dominant sport. Key to that tends to be the presence of a pro team in that sport in the media market. (Salt Lake City in Utah tends to be a basketball town in part because of its lack of an NFL team. This, as well as immigration, has allowed soccer and rugby to occupy football’s niche. Indianapolis, Indiana has a pro-football team which does have strong local support, but it’s still mostly a basketball town on account of its role in basketball history and the Pacers [and the fact that the Colts are still fairly new to Indianapolis, while the Pacers are a legacy team]. Chicago has teams in every major sport, but the Cubs and White Sox, being some of the oldest teams in the sport, grant baseball a higher level of significance, relative to the rest of the country. NY is a tough nut to crack on account of having two major teams in every major sport, the Knicks and the Nets in the NBA, the Mets and Yankees in MLB, the Jets and the Giants in the NFL*, Red Bulls and NYCFC in MLS, Rangers, Devils, and Islanders** in the NHL.)
* Both teams play in New Jersey, perhaps lessening their impact on the market overall.
** The Rangers are the only team in the Five Boroughs, while the Devils are out in Newark and the Islanders are out on Long Island. So the Rangers are likely the only team to draw significant support from throughout the metropolitan area.
Of course, football, basketball, and baseball have largely non-conflicting seasons. Baseball begins during the basketball season (around March/April, while basketball is gearing up towards the playoffs). The early season tends to be of primary interest to people who are fans of the sport specifically or fans of a specific team that they expect good performance from, though, so most casual sports fans pay more attention to basketball here. Basketball has its finals in (usually early) June, enabling baseball to take over as the summer sport. Baseball is approaching the playoffs when early season NFL begins. Granted, football fans make up a decent portion of the sports fandom of the US, so there’s a greater emphasis on early season football than there is on early season baseball. Even then, baseball will get some attention from sports fans (especially ones that prefer basketball to football). Basketball doesn’t really get going until after the World Series but does get going before the NFL playoffs. This calendar format makes it hard for another sport to break into the US limelight, since it mostly books the whole year, as far as sports are concerned. The fact that the largest media market in the US happens to have one of the strongest baseball teams and a strong baseball culture also goes a long way to securing baseball’s position in US sports, even as it loses relevance to football and basketball in the country overall.
Factoring in college sports (which are likely co-equals with professional sports in terms of viewership and fan support) changes a few things. Hockey, baseball, and soccer at most schools tend to be at the level of intramural play (which makes sense given that all three sports have development systems, while basketball’s development system largely takes a backseat to college recruiting and football’s development system IS college football). Basketball and football also have the advantage of playing during the academic year, while baseball is usually outside of the academic year. A locally strong college team can take some of the momentum away from potential professional expansion teams. And college sports fans are more likely to be fans of specific teams instead of fans of the sport or casual sports fans. College football largely is on a non-compete schedule with pro football (college on Saturdays, pro on Sundays), while college and pro basketball are on potentially conflicting schedules. Fans of college sports teams tend to have closely held reasons for being fans of their team (perhaps they’re the hometown team of the town you grew up in, perhaps it’s the school you went to, but ethnic and religious factors can also come into play, such as eastern Midwestern Catholics supporting Notre Dame), which means that support tends to stay the same even as fans move around the country.
