For FIFA, the US is the single largest source of television audience and therefore advertising revenue.
For the US, on the other hand, soccer is just one of many sports. In fact, the US is one of very few countries where soccer is not the sport.
Americans are nowhere near as desperate for soccer as FIFA is desperate for American money.
It's a fair assumption that the administration in the US cares. They put significant work into the 2022 World Cup bid and were beaten in the final round by Qatar. It is highly unlikely that this is unrelated to that.
Fine by me, honestly. FIFA is pretty damn corrupt, and if this is what it takes, then so be it.
Are you for real? This statement is so ridiculous that I don't even know where to start. You do realize football is by a huge margin, the most popular sports on this planet, right?
http://www.espnfc.com/fifa-world-cup/story/1950567/world-cup...
The US had 43.8 million people watching the final (in English and Spanish). Germany (who was in the final) had 34.65 million people watching. Even if Argentina had ever single person in their country watching, they'd only have 42.6 million people watching (wiki estimate). Granted Brazil almost definitely has higher viewership, but the US is definitely one of the largest.
For example, the 2006 world cup attracted 4 billion viewers from China, and their team was not even playing.[1]
[1] http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/fifafacts/ffprojects/ip-401_...
Something suspicious about that...
If 1 person watches 6 matches they count as 6 "viewers" for those statistics. It makes sense if you're trying to track retainment for an event that's broken up into several instances.
And note that the quote says "SOURCE of advertising revenue", not "viewership".
It's not so hard to believe, given that a lot of the multi-nationals that advertise aggressively in FIFA are American-held... Americans don't have to like football to believe that advertising during the world cup could be profitable...
By comparison, FIFA's worldwide revenue from broadcasting rights for the 2014 World Cup was around $2.4 billion [2].
American soccer fans might only constitute a small fraction of soccer fans worldwide, but they watch more ads and have deeper pockets than most of the rest. A billion poor fans don't make FIFA any money.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2014/06/09/american-w...
[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/380788/revenue-of-the-201...
It's clear the TV broadcasting price has jumped rapidly over the years. You can't compare the current revenue with a future deal. 100 million over two world cups is still a tiny portion compared to 2.4 billion in one world cup.