Well, I’d say that tennis did catch on. Ashe, McEnroe, Agassi, Sampras, the Williams sisters, Billie Jean King, Evert; they all had major followings as pros. It’s also a very popular sport to play at all levels of skill. It does have ups and downs, but in terms of pros, it’s a pretty consistent sport to be able to make a living at, which isn’t true of very many single player sports that aren’t fighting.

Soccer, yeah, it’s way behind in terms of draw. There’s a shit ton of opinions about why that is, but I’ve never really put any time into considering them because I’m not a team sports guy at all, and soccer/futbol is low on the list of what I’ll sit and watch for any period of time even when I’m in that mood.

As far as the thought experiment of pitting the players against each other, you’d run into three conflicting training and selection paradigms. I dunno if you’ve ever played both, but holy fuck do they take different bodies to do well at.

Even a running back or wide receiver is going to out mass most Soccer players, and most Soccer players would have trouble with the extra gear even if they didn’t get tackled. So you run into each sport being dominated by people that are physically less capable at the other one at pro levels. At amateur levels, that isn’t as drastic, but you’d see the players from the other sport gassing out early.

Besides, the argument about which sport is “better” has nothing to do with the players. They’re all peak level athletes in the pros, so that’s not relevant. People will argue about it, but people are mostly idiots that will argue whether vanilla is better than chocolate just because they think whatever opinion they hold is superior even when there’s no competition in the first place (they’re entirely different things, not opposites).