Played through high school and am a fan, but it's just not a TV sport - that's why Americans hate it.
In Futbol, the refs don't stop play everytime someone makes a ten yard pass, while one team gyrates and celebrates like they won the lottery.
Actually though - it's because the camera angles you have to show it in suck. In american football and hoops, you get lots of close in and iso camera angles during a play. For futbol, you have to pull the camera way out because the current field of play is so much larger than halfcourt in hoops or the 15 yards from scrimmage. There are also many more breaks, more scoring (american football fakes it by giving 6 pts for a TD though), and more stats and measures of progress. Futbol is more fluid.
If you could show futbol at that same camera distance, you'd see the same types of highly technical moves and freakish athletic ability that you see in basketball and hoops, but it doesnt translate from a press box cam.
Edit - I think we could tailor futbol to the american audience if refs were quicker to call PKs, but only award them a point, while goals during play were worth 2. It'd also help if the offside rule only applied "inside the 20"... That would open up 30 or so yards of the opponents side of the field and make it really hard to defend. I think games would have scores like 9-7, all the time (or 63-49 if you wanna use the american system).