But while attendance soars and TV ratings for the games show increased interest on par with the NBA Finals and baseball’s World Series, it’s still unclear how long that will last. For some analysts, it remains to be seen whether or not this will be a decisive moment.

“It’s gone from being on the periphery to being mainstream in the sense that there’s a strong minority group of people who love it; that’s the biggest difference,” said Jeff Schneider, executive director of the Sports, Entertainment, Media and Technology Law Center at the University of Southern California (USC).

Schneider argued that soccer, which many Americans consider a “foreign import,” will never be in the zeitgeist like American football or basketball. Those sports have an older history in the United States and came of age in a time when media was not as ubiquitous “and when people spent their free time doing things, not passively consuming them.”

But he admitted there was a firmly established foothold of loyal fans who watch and play the sport, and that number has been increasing.

This is mainly due to youth sports.

“Football has advanced where [American] Soccer as a youth sport has declined,” said Steve Bank, a sports law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “In [American] “In football, people worry about concussions, and that kind of thing has made it more problematic over the years.”

If the national team advances further, then the chances of the sport advancing in the U.S. will increase. Belgium stepped in on Monday night and scrutiny on the team’s performance has only increased following the controversial overturning of striker Folarin Balogun’s red card following a phone call between Trump and Infantino.

The seeds of growth were sown 30 years ago when a professional league called Major League Soccer (MLS) was launched as part of the agreement the United States signed when it hosted the 1994 World Cup. MLS now has 30 teams in the United States and Canada and features the world’s biggest star, Lionel Messi.

But the biggest audiences are the English Premier League and Spanish La Liga, which have contributed to a sharp increase in spending on football broadcast rights, according to research from Ampere Analysis., external

This growth has made the United States the largest foreign market for the four major European leagues.

A recent Ampere survey of sports fans found that football has narrowly unseated baseball as the No. 3 sport in the U.S., with 10% of Americans saying it is their favorite.