What Makes a Sport Popular?
It’s Sunday night. You know what that means. It’s time to turn on the TV, kick back your chair, grab a beer, and enjoy the great American sport of Football. It’s the Bills vs the Jets. You lean forward - this is going to be a good match. 5,000 miles away, you’re in London. It’s Man United vs Arsenal. The pub is packed to the brim with people cheering, eagerly awaiting the starting whistle. Zoom out, then zoom back in on India. You're in Delhi. What’s playing right now? It’s not soccer, it’s not football, it’s cricket! Thousands of people crowd the stadium to watch India vs Pakistan, a rivalry running deeper than sports. All over the world, across remote villages, people gather to watch sports. Which one? You don’t know. There are hundreds of sports, each with its own unique fan base; people willing to go to extreme lengths for their team.
Why? What makes a sport popular? What about soccer makes it the most popular sport?
I’m going to try and answer what makes a sport popular. Have you ever wondered why soccer is the most popular sport in the world?
Here are the current top 10 most popular sports in the world, ranked by current number of fans:
Football (soccer)
Cricket
Hockey (all variations)
Tennis
Volleyball
Table Tennis
Basketball
Baseball
Rugby
Golf
This is the list I’ll be referencing from now on.
There are many factors that contribute to a sport being popular. We’re going to look at the 4 factors that make a sport popular. Keep in mind that these are based off of fans, and not active players.
Influential players
Cost
History
Excitement level
Name 3 professional soccer players. That’s pretty easy. Now name 3 professional rugby players. Little tougher right? Depending on where you live, this question might be easy, or downright impossible. World-renowned athletes tend to attract people to watch and play their sport. Having more famous players tends to equate with a sports popularity, so it’s no surprise that the most popular sport, soccer, includes the two people with the most popular instagram accounts. Let’s look at ESPN’s top 30 most popular athletes, and see how many athletes fall into each sport:
Soccer (11) Cristiano Ronaldo - Mohammad Salah
Tennis (5) Roger Federer - Kei Nishikori
Cricket (4) Virat Kohli - Suresh Raina
Basketball (3) LeBron James - Kevin Durant
Golf (3) Tiger Woods - Phil Mickelson
MMA (2) Connor Mgregor
Formula one (1) Lewis Hamilton
Snowboarding (1) Shaun White
As you can see, most of the sports on the list above are on the top 10 most played sports.
The more time a sport has been played, the more likely it becomes popular. So sports that were spread earlier in history have more time to become popular. This would be why MMA isn’t in the top 10 most popular sports, because it only became popular around the 1970’s, when Bruce Lee piqued the interest of the world. Most sports on this list were enjoyed in colonial times, often spread by a global superpower at the time, like the British empire. Most newer sports like American Football and MMA were invented during the early to late 1900’s, when the industrial revolution gave the rising middle class enough leisure time to enjoy new sports like these.
About 70% of the world makes ten dollars or less a day. Do you think those people are going to have enough money to buy sports equipment, pay a club membership fee, or take sports lessons? Most of the world can’t afford a sport that takes a lot of money for equipment or lessons. If you notice, the top 3 most popular sports in the world can be played with just a field, some sticks, friends, and maybe a ball. The less that’s required to play a sport, the more people around the world can play it, and most of the sports on the list don’t require that much to play.
Finally, the factor is excitement level. Technically, distance running has been around for centuries, requires virtually nothing to do, and includes some really famous people like Usain Bolt, so why isn’t this sport more popular? Because watching someone run around a track just isn’t as fun as watching a live soccer game. All popular sports are exciting to watch, involving either quick movement, fast shots, or both.
