ESPN the Magazine writer Chris Sprow, who is someone anyone reading this should familiarize themselves with (he’s really good, is what I’m saying; he’ll be penning your favorite Magazine story soon, and you’ll look up at the byline and then you’ll be like “Oh, yeah, Eamonn told me this would happen,” and somewhere I’ll smile knowingly) has an excellent little piece today about soccer stats. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

See, soccer doesn’t have stats. Period. It has goals. Assists, kind of. But compared to most American sports, which are drenched in gooey statistical goodness, soccer has zilch. Sprow’s thesis is that this lack of stats is the barrier preventing soccer’s popularity in America. This is an interesting thought. (I told you he was really good!)

And in an argument- and fantasy-obsessed American sports society, soccer often does too. Part of the problem, of course, is the number of leagues there are. There’s no table that can tell us that 23 goals in the Premier League would mean 37 in MLS. There’s no algorithm to explain the assist rate from a Serie A midfielder as compared to the Mexican League. It’s about styles, systems and results. And darn right, it IS the most popular sport in the world. But it could never win out as the subject for a good American “bargument.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if soccer could ever aspire to gain the cultural hold on America that it desires — this from a former college player who watches a ton of soccer and plays to this day — the solution is easy: Give us more numbers. Make ‘em the type we can really use.

As Sprow notes, there are some good stats out there already, and people are growing more and more sophisticated about the numbers every day. There are finite ways of looking at a soccer game. There have also been major advances in pitch coverage and the like. But if a soccer stat falls in the forest and a young sports fan — who probably played soccer as a kid and wants to follow the game — doesn’t hear it, does it exist? No. So popularization of these numbers, something that’s taken baseball and basketball and football years to accomplish, is a main problem.

More generally, though, I’m not sure stats are exactly what people need. Maybe casual fans want to be able to argue about soccer. But can’t they already do so with a minimum of effort? It’s not like most bar arguments are all that well thought out, anyway. In the end, stats could certainly help, but the larger systemic things preventing soccer from “taking over” America, as has been so frequently and inaccurately prophesized, still exist. More engaging numbers would be great, but this problem runs deeper.