Imagine polling Americans on the eve of the Super Bowl and finding that nearly two-thirds of adults who say they're "all in" on the game can't name one player on either team.

That would sound absurd.

But that's more or less the current state of affairs with the US Men's National Team. In a survey I conducted last week (n=303 Americans 18+), nearly two-thirds of respondents who said they're "all in" on the World Cup could not name a single current USMNT player.

The low awareness numbers didn't surprise me. What did was the composition of the fanbase. It wasn't filled with soccer fans.

The obvious answer to "who's going to watch the World Cup this summer?" is MLS and Premier League viewers. And the survey data backs that up — if you watch soccer, you're more likely to say you're "all in" on the World Cup this summer.

But there's a more interesting finding sitting underneath that one. NFL fans were the least likely to say they plan to watch the World Cup — just 25% — but among people who were "all in" on the World Cup, most follow the NFL.

The contradiction disappears once you account for the size of the NFL's fanbase. Even with a relatively low "all in" rate, NFL fans still make up an outsized share of World Cup viewers because there are so many of them.

In fact, the single strongest predictor of World Cup interest isn't whether someone watches soccer. It's how many sports they watch overall. The more leagues a person follows — NFL, NBA, golf, whatever — the more likely they are to be dialed in come June.

This is essentially Byron Sharp's thesis playing out on a soccer field. Sharp (the author of "How Brands Grow," a popular book among marketers) pointed out that brands grow not by deepening loyalty among a core tribe, but by reaching as many casual buyers as possible.

The survey shows that World Cup fans are defined by a general interest in sports, not a tribal identity. There are people who get into sports, and people who don't. The World Cup, it turns out, is mostly just the next thing the first group is going to watch.

This is what makes the USMNT weird. For every other major North American team, a fanbase has a kind of permanent existence. Like cicadas, the USMNT emerges every four years, fills the air with noise, and disappears. The team doesn't maintain a fanbase. The moment creates one.

Sports diverge from Sharp's model in one important way. Sharp talks about how brands should build and maintain "mental availability" among mass market shoppers. That's an academic way of saying "make sure as many people know you exist when they're ready to buy."

The challenge with the USMNT is that it gets shelf space once every four years. The World Cup is so infrequent that casual fans simply forget the team exists.

The Gold Cup, Nations League, and friendlies help, but they draw a fraction of the audience. The MLS and European leagues — which now carry a record number of American players — fill some of that gap, but they're not the national team. The emotional stakes aren't the same.

Sharp's model explains who will watch the USMNT this summer. But how do you turn that audience into fans who know the players and follow the team between World Cups?

I don't think the answer has anything to do with marketing.

My six-year-old can probably name twenty soccer players, including a handful of Americans. He doesn't experience soccer once every four years. He experiences it through weekly practice, Premier League mornings on NBC, and a binder stuffed with soccer cards.

He's not alone. The survey shows that 18 to 34 year olds are far more likely to name an active USMNT player than older respondents. Rerun this survey in fifteen years and I think that trend continues.

So my pitch to the USMNT marketing team: don't spend this summer trying to convert casual sports fans. Target parents with young kids. The World Cup coming to the US is a once-in-a-generation opportunity — not to spike awareness among people who won't remember it in four years, but to plant a flag with the generation that will actually stick around.

The survey I fielded for this newsletter had six questions. It took respondents an average of 1 minute and 7 seconds to complete. You can take it here.

If you've spent any time around "quant" in the world of brands and marketing, you've seen the bloated version: surveys with dozens of questions, decks running 50-plus slides. Everyone knows this kind of research is wasteful, and not even useful. My mantra: if the survey is long, it's wrong. A few good questions can get you somewhere interesting. Hopefully this newsletter showed you that.

If you're thinking about running a survey or just tired of quant that goes nowhere, you can book a Roast. Or subscribe below for more content like this.