It is Fifa’s own policies and hunger for monetization that has helped prevent American soccer from growing organically.

The American market is spending huge amounts of money on live soccer. A lot of it just isn’t going to MLS. That expenditure doesn’t come from a bottomless pit of wealth, although Fifa remains intent on finding out just where the floor is with towering ticket prices to the upcoming summer bonanzas. At some point, soccer fans will be tapped out on what they’re willing to spend to watch live games. If you want domestic American soccer to develop, you have to institute a kind of soccer protectionism – although that may presently not land so well. Or to do something, anything, to ensure that a growing league doesn’t spend its entire season fighting off all the interlopers keen on its market, arriving routinely to pick off the interest and ransack the audience’s disposable income. But then Fifa is no longer in the business of opening up new markets, as it once was. Rather, it is fully focused on monetizing the sport, no matter the collateral damage.