Will basketball be more influential than soccer globally someday?

Americans seem to have a weird habit regarding their sports - they love it when foreign individuals do well (e.g. Jap baseball players, NFL kickers like Andersen and Gramatica), but can't seem to accept foreign TEAMS beating them at "their" games - the World Baseball Classic immediately springs to mind. Basketball has a long way to go before it touches football (soccer). Outside of North America, you really only have a handful of teams that can compete at a world-class level, and only a few leagues that offer a decent standard of play, whereas football is literally worldwide.

I personally don't think so. Basketball is not as popular as soccer in most of the world. Believe me, I am European, and most europeans do not care about basketball in the slightest. So it would be hard for basketball to live up to soccer, which is a really popular sport all over the world, not just in Europe, but in South America and Africa too, where people as far as I know, do not really care about basketball either.