The biggest club competitions kick off in European afternoons and evenings, which lands in the American morning. The consequence is a fan culture built around highlights rather than live viewing.
The scheduling is set by the home market
Kickoff times are chosen for the domestic audience of each league, and overseas viewers are accommodated only where the rights are valuable enough to matter.
A Saturday match that suits an evening crowd in Europe arrives before lunch on the American east coast and considerably earlier on the west.
Midweek continental fixtures land in the middle of a working afternoon, which excludes most of the audience from watching as it happens.
Highlights became the default rather than the supplement
A viewer who cannot watch live consumes the match afterward as a package of goals and incidents, usually before any full replay is available.
That reverses the normal order, in which highlights condense something already seen. Here they are the primary experience of the match.
Fans consequently know the goals of matches they never watched, and their sense of a team is assembled from moments rather than from performances.
What an edit leaves out shapes the understanding
Highlight packages retain goals, near misses and controversies. They discard long stretches of control, defensive work and the pattern of a match.
A team that dominates for an hour without scoring appears in an edit only through its misses, which reads as wastefulness rather than as dominance.
Reputations built this way skew toward players who appear in decisive moments, which is one reason forwards are overrated relative to defenders in casual conversation.
Spoilers make the edit harder to enjoy
A viewer intending to watch later must avoid scores all morning, which is difficult when notifications, social feeds and colleagues all carry results.
Many stop trying and watch the highlights knowing the outcome, which removes the tension that makes a match worth the full ninety minutes.
The habit compounds, and a supporter who has watched edits for a season finds full matches slow in a way they did not previously.
Domestic soccer is scheduled to fix exactly this
The American league plays in local evenings and weekend afternoons, which is the only major soccer most of the country can watch live as a matter of routine.
That accessibility is a real structural advantage over the imported competitions, whatever the difference in quality between them.
It also explains why domestic attendances have grown while much of the audience's attention still sits with leagues they can only watch afterward.