I think rugby would compete for the same kinds of athletes who grow up dreaming of being footballers. Does America really have that many people who understand rugby and want to play it?

I think that there are many sports here is the U.S., but it comes down to education and knowledge of the sport. We are not exposed to much except football, baseball, and more recently, soccer. I personally enjoy rugby and need to find a league here.

I enjoy Rugby. That being said, it is easier to find Aussie Rules Football on TV--and I have 100+ channels of sports on my DirecTV.

It often takes a while for sports to mature in America. Soccer (nee football) only reached widespread popularity in the U.S. about a decade ago.

It's hard for any sport to get traction in the US (and I suspect anywhere). It's a classic boot-strapping problem. You need enough people playing it so that there's a broad base of good athletes to choose from. But in order for people to want to play it, it has to be something that they see a lot of (which these days, typically means on TV). But they're only going to see a lot of it on TV if the broadcasters think there's money in it. So you need enough people who want to watch it so that there's money to be made. But few people are going to watch a sport that's not already popular. Who are they going to talk to about last night's game? If nobody talks about the game, then they might even forget to watch it.

So if you wanted to make rugby popular in the US, you'd have to find a way to get a lot of people to start watching games. Rugby in particular is a little more complex than sports like basketball, hockey, non-American football/soccer, golf, tennis, or racing and so it's harder for a beginner to start watching. The same is true for American football and baseball, but we're already watching them. Cricket is even worse. But the complexity issue is really a rather small one. If you wanted to get rugby to catch on in the US, I'd start with the universities. Big schools can support teams in a large number of sports, even relatively unpopular ones like rugby or lacrosse. Find schools with teams that have interesting stories behind them and make a big local media push to get people excited about it. If you could get a school that isn't normally great at athletics to do very well in rugby, then it wouldn't be too hard to get the entire student base fired up. If you could keep up this kind of pressure at a number of universities, you might be able to get people interested in the sport for its own sake. Then you'd need to make sure that those people could have easy access to coverage of games, probably international coverage via the internet. You might be able to create enough of a niche in the US to eventually make it worth some investor's while to create a small league. Of course, that's some really pie-in-the-sky dreaming. It takes a lot of money to start a league for any team sport.

And even then, there's a long slog to try and reach truly popular levels. Even non-American football has a hard time in the US, despite the fact that we (the US and Canada) have had a league for 16 years, and due to the fact that it's hugely popular as a sport for kids to play, everyone knows how to play it. And still, most people in the US would be challenged to name more than one player in the league. And this is a sport that almost all kids in the US grow up playing. It'd only be worse for a sport like rugby where we don't even know the basic rules of the game!

Interesting perspectives, folks. I suppose that it's a more complex problem than simply an observation that the US has a lot of people and quite a few athletes who cannot play in the NFL and therefore need something to do. Probably true that it starts with universities. I heard at one point that Rupert Murdoch was trying to get a league going in the States but decided not to after looking at probability of success.

Either way, the Americans are missing out. Brilliant game.

Well... "foot"ball is the American rugby, just as baseball is the American cricket, no? Besides what others have said, I think an obstacle is that football is too similar to rugby.

Too much legal liability from not being protected with silly helmets and padding ?

American football is tediously slow with long gaps every few minutes, and substitute players all the time. Compared to rugby which generally keeps going unless someone is seriously injured, not an uncommon thing as it is a "dangerous" and rather rough sport.