Charlotte NC has a professional soccer team that I just found out about.

I watch a decent amount of sports. I'm not a super-fan nor am I obsessed with certain teams or stats and I also regularly miss games because it isn't really a huge priority in my life. Sometimes I only find out that the games are even on when I am flipping channels and I happen across it. There is only one exception to this and this is the NFL. While I realize that globally speaking NFL isn't very popular I think that if you are American you can easily see that American Football is by far the most popular sport here and people just love it. During the NFL season I keep up with not just the teams I favor, but all of the teams.

North Carolina isn't a massively populated state, but it is big enough to support almost all professional sports and South Carolina tends to jump in with us in the support of our teams which will normally just be called "Carolina" rather than North Carolina.

That being said, people in USA tend to not really care about soccer and I just recently found out that we have an MLS team that I was unaware existed for a while now.

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They are called Charlotte FC and this was a bit of a surprise to me because almost no one refers to the sport as football here in USA even though most of the rest of the world does. I'm not trying to be patriotic or anything but I honestly didn't even know that the world called this sport "football" until I was a teenager. We didn't have internet when I was a kid so when your area called something a word, that's what it was. There was no way for you to know otherwise unless some friend came up with this information and even then, there was no way to confirm or deny it properly.

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In their opening game they set a record with a very impressive attendance record of nearly 75,000 people in the stands and for me, I think that this is too big of a stadium and those numbers were definitely going to dwindle. I don't know for sure that it has, but judging by the overall interest in MLS or soccer / football in general in this country, I would be surprised if they are regularly getting 1/4 of that many people in the stands for games. This certainly would have waned during the lockdown period of their history which would have been right after they started since they were only added to the league in 2019.

Just by looking at the wiki for all teams, it seems as though teams struggle to get 20k people a game and while that would be all fine and dandy in clubs around the world that only have a capacity of that many people anyway it could be a bit embarrassing for a club like Charlotte FC who doesn't even have their own stadium.

Like a lot of MLS teams, Charlotte simply uses an already existing stadium that they share with the NFL team and therefore go for the same primary colors on their jerseys and other merchandise. The Carolina Panthers, despite being a pretty terrible team for many years now, manage to sell out almost every home game. Charlotte FC on the other hand, most likely will have under 20,000 fans attending each game, much like almost all of the rest of the league.

I guess you could say that I am happy that we have a team, but honestly, you could give me tickets to a home game for free and I still wouldn't attend. It's a pain in the ass to go to home games for most sports here because it is going to take you as much time to go to and from the game as the game itself is going to last. This is just getting in and out of the parking lot too. I like 6 hours drive from Charlotte, so the chances of me ever going to a game is slim to none.

I think that most people here feel the same way about the prospect of going to a game. I think the rest of the world finds it bizarre that Americans just don't get into the world's most popular sport and that is fair enough. On the flip side though, people's culture dictates what they are going to do and enjoy and generally, Americans find the global passion over a sport that regularly ends with a 1-0 or even 0-0 final score, something that is very difficult to get excited about. Maybe we are just impatient.

I think I will probably treat this knowledge that we have a pro team here the same way that most of the the rest of my Carolinians are going to: I might get excited if they make the playoffs (if they even have playoffs in that league) but until then, I probably won't even have any idea if they are doing well or not.