Roger Bennett’s message to A-Rod is one for the country: Soccer has already overtaken baseball in America

The article argues that soccer has overtaken baseball as America’s No. 3 sport, with Ampere Analysis cited as showing soccer behind only football and basketball in Q4 2024. It highlights strong audience momentum ahead of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup and 2027 Women’s World Cup, including Netflix’s exclusive U.S. rights for the women’s tournaments and NBC’s record 850,000 average viewers for the 2025-26 Premier League opening weekend. The piece is mainly a bullish media-and-sponsorship narrative, implying continued growth in fan engagement, rights value, and advertiser interest.

Analysis

The setup is less about “soccer growth” than about a structural reallocation of attention inside US sports media. The key second-order effect is that the audience is no longer linear and domestic-only; it is identity-based, diaspora-heavy, and year-round, which makes monetization more durable than a one-off tournament spike. That disproportionately favors scalable rights holders and distributors with subscription, ad-tech, and global content leverage — especially names that can turn episodic live events into a broader funnel for retention and cross-sell.

The biggest near-term beneficiary is Netflix: exclusive women’s rights are valuable not just for live viewership, but for incremental household penetration into a format where churn sensitivity is lower than in movie/series libraries. The risk, though, is that the market may already be pricing a generic “sports rights are good” narrative without underwriting execution: women’s rights need packaging, shoulder programming, and social amplification to matter financially. If engagement disappoints, the uplift can fade quickly after the event window, making this more of a months-long catalyst than a multi-year rerating on its own.

Home Depot is more subtle. The brand integration is less about direct media ROI than about accessing a high-intent, culturally broad audience during a period when home improvement spend is still rate-sensitive and promotional. If the tournament drives incremental in-store traffic or app engagement, the upside is in top-of-funnel brand lift rather than immediate EPS, so the trade works best as a sentiment/marketing optionality story, not a fundamental earnings driver. The risk is that any macro slowdown or housing weakness overwhelms whatever goodwill the campaign creates.

Manchester United is the contrarian short: US fandom may be large, but it is increasingly decoupled from on-field glory, which means commercial upside is not automatically translated into valuation support for underperforming clubs. The consensus misses that Americanization of the sport can expand the pie while still widening the gap between globally marketable franchises and heritage brands with poor performance optics. That argues for selective exposure to winners of localization and content distribution rather than passive long exposure to marquee clubs.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long NFLX vs. short DIS on a 3-6 month horizon: pair the exclusive women’s World Cup rights and global sports optionality against Disney’s more crowded, lower-growth sports bundle; target modest upside with defined downside if event-driven streaming engagement beats.
• Buy NFLX call spreads into the 2027 women’s rights ramp (e.g., 12-18 month tenor): the asymmetry is in re-rating from perceived “content company” to premium live-event platform; risk is limited to execution and a hype fade after the tournament cycle.
• Long HD on a tactical 1-3 month basis around the tournament marketing push, but treat it as a low-conviction sentiment trade: upside is brand lift and incremental traffic, downside is muted unless housing/macro weakens further.
• Short MANU on any strength tied to US soccer enthusiasm: the market may overestimate how much American fandom translates into operating leverage for an underperforming club; best expressed via equity or listed derivatives if borrow is available.
• If seeking broader thematic exposure, prefer a basket long of NFLX + HD and short global consumer brands with weaker event capture, using the World Cup window as the catalyst; expect the trade to work over weeks to months, not years.