Holy Shit, didn't know that actually, I thought it was a few cities. Well, Canada has about 9 stadiums in 9 cities that meet the Fifa Minimum to host the world cup (according to wikipedia).

Actually, I wouldn't really doubt it. Were talking 9-13 years from now which is quite a long time. Doesn't seem to unreasonable.

Sure.  David Beckham has been considered a top player, at least at times (although I've always felt him to be overrated).  He was somewhat ineffectual for Los Angeles and they failed to even make the playoffs in MLS (the top eight teams out of 13) in the past two seasons.  I was just pointing out that a player who was starting for a Real Madrid side that won the La Liga title the season before came to MLS and failed to even help his team to the playoffs.  I think that says a little about the qualify of the league, as I've described.

David Beckham was 32 years old at the time though. He wasn't really a key player for Real Madrid anymore (to the same extent as he used to be), and that's pretty obvious considering they sold him (without really having a top of the line back-up).

I do believe Beckham was also injured when he arrived, and had several injures during his 2 years for Galaxy.

Not only that, but Los Angel Galaxy had already made some silly mismanagements, and the club was starting to do pretty horribly, Beckham was just not able to reverse that.

I don't think you can take Beckham not making a major impact as something that tells you the MLS league is as high quality as the European (top) leagues.

to be honest, I think giving the WC to the US would be a very good decision by FIFA because (as mentioned above) the '94 one was, by a fairly large margin, the most successful WC ever, both financially and attendance-wise. Also, I would dare-say it was primarily responsible for the tremendous surge in the popularity of soccer (yeah I know I committed the unpardonable sin there....) in this country in recent years. Yeah, we don't have any pro leagues to speak of, but pretty much all schools and colleges have soccer teams now and a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people play in them.

However, competing with MLB, the NBA. the NHL, NCAA football and basketball, and especially the NFL is not an easy task for a sport that Americans like to play, but generally don't like to watch. I think this is the main problem soccer has in the US. The vast majority of the population (myself included) think it is incredibly boring to watch, even if they like to play it. My pet theory for this is the low scoring, the lack of any intermediate goals or 'stepping stones' to scoring, and the lack of physical contact. For example, basketball and football are relatively fast-paced and (most of the time) feature a large amount of scoring. Both football and hockey have a lot of physical contact, and baseball and football have tangible intermediate steps to scoring (baseball's bases and football's 'downs' system).

Not a good theory perhaps, but violence, action, and/or the sense of accomplishing something definitely hold an American's attention better than a bunch of guys kicking a ball around and (seemingly) accomplishing nothing. Also, it probably doesn't help that soccer doesn't have any good equivalents to basketball's slam dunks, baseball's crack of the bat, hockey's slams (and fights...), and football's 80-yard (77-meters) passes and devastating hits, though the occasional soccer breakaway can be somewhat exciting.

Football has a similar amount of scoring to the number of touchdowns in NFL games.  No, that's not basketball scoring or even hockey or baseball, but still, American football is more popular than any of those.  I guess we could just assign an arbitrary number of 7 points per goal or something, but you get my point.

As for "lack of physical contact," are you sure we're talking about the same game?

While I wholeheartedly (and happily) agree that the mismanagement of the La La Gals played a large part in their poor performance, and that you can't draw leaguewide conclusions based on the performance of one player, I was just using Beckham as a well-known example.  Having watched MLS since 1996 and also European and South American leagues on a regular basis, I feel qualified to draw reasonable conclusions.  I never said MLS is as good as top European leagues (in fact, I said the opposite if you read my earlier posts).