Soccer - Why isn't the 'Hood down with the Beautiful Game

It is a question that vexes serious American soccer fans. Why isn't the 'hood down with the beautiful game? Soccer and the poor have an enduring love affair on the majority of the planet. One of the noteable exceptions to this is the USA. Both the sport and the athletic talent that abounds in America's disadvantaged neighborhoods are the poorer as a result. The beautiful game loses out on an abundant bounty of talent that is largely directed towards gridiron football and basketball, and said aforementioned sports does not fully employ said talent because both sports have daunting physical requirements (size being the main one) that mostly preclude those of average height. Whereas soccer is a sport where all sizes of athletes have a place on the pitch. Another inducement for the poor American athlete is one of numbers. The NFL has only 1696 (53 man roster times the number of teams, 32) player jobs available every year. The NBA and other professional basketball leagues has more jobs available, but height is a daunting prerequisite. Professional soccer meanwhile has many more jobs available across the planet. It also has the added benefit for those with the outsized ego whom feel the need to proclaim to the world that they are "the best in the world" that their boast will have been proven or not in a sport that has actual world reach (that is partial at best with basketball and certainly not the case with gridiron football).
Part of the answer can best be laid at the door of culture. Soccer is simply not on the radar of the native-born American underclass. You do not see rappers wearing soccer jerseys in their videos (even though the opportunity was there for Snoop Dogg to do so for his "Beautiful" video, which was partially shot in a Brazilian favela; he wore NFL jerseys instead). This despite American rap being ubiquitous in the locker rooms of professional soccer teams in Europe and South America, not to mention the larger media landscape. The wider media landscape is not a part of the lifeways of the poor though, as poverty world-wide tends to have a provincalizing effect: how many times has one heard from poor athletes the eye-opening effect sof leaving their 'hood? Add in the particularity of American soccer being the province of the suburban elite (whom more than likely would not welcome the competition, as their resistance to the inclusion of American Hispanics into the mainstream of the sport shows), and the picture presented is not encouraging.
Barring a media figure along the lines of the aforementioned Snoop Dogg or 50 Cent adopting soccer as part of their iconography, soccer is more than likely to remain an unknown amongst an audience that both could profit from.