I'm with Ck on this one.

I still find it hard to believe that a sequel with signifficantly better reviews (thusfar), online play, and on a much more popular system will undersell it's predecessor.

I expect it to sell similarly to RE4, that's my base line.

I think maybe a few thousand less units on first week and then slightly more each week for a fair while.

It might make top 10 for August NPD.

This is just not true. You might say professional soccer is not so popular in the U.S. and you might have a point, although I could argue. But to say the #2 participation sport in the country (only basketball is higher) is not a popular sport defies logic.

To stay OT, FIFA games have very respectable sales in the U.S., so I wouldn't use that line of reasoning to disqualify the possibility of strong sales (even though the games are not similar, of course). 

Isn't this game released in Europe already? How many units has this game sold worldwide?

350k first week, 1m total... mainly because of the online aspect

Just as an interesting aside, for possible future projection use, it appears that the number of unique ranked players for the North America region is at about 25,000 as of this evening (Thursday), up from 17,000 24 hours ago. I wonder what percentage of copies sold have equated to players online. Is this game selling mainly to people who crave an online Wii game? Or will the percentage map closely to the number of Wii owners who have put their systems online, implying that the game is selling to everyone and not just on the strength of online?

Not that I have any answers. :)