Ranking sports’ popularity
And the silver goes to...
WHICH sport is the world’s
favourite? The answer, football, feels so self-evident that it is barely worth
a post. But what about the world’s second favourite?
In 2005 England was in the
thrall of a glorious cricketing summer. That year’s Ashes series, a biennial
battle in which Australia used to thrash England (before gloating about it
insufferably), was going to the wire. Five wonderfully close Test matches had
brought the country to a standstill. (It even knocked The World’s Favourite
Sport off of the back pages for a while.)
Out of curiosity, I checked out the American press to see whether
news of this parochial clash obsessing England had made it across the pond. It
was with pride that I saw that it had made the New York Times (if
I remember correctly), albeit in a report so hidden away that it seemed
surprised to be found. The article stated—casually, with no supporting
evidence—that cricket was the “world’s second most popular sport”. The next day
I saw the claim again, equally unsubstantiated, in the British version of
the Times.
I was reminded of this recently by a comment on our inaugural Game
Theory post: “After soccer/football, what is the world's SECOND most popular
sport?...I heard it may be cricket, but controversy abounds.” It got me
wondering how one defines a sport’s popularity.
The first definition that
leaps to mind is the number of people watching it on television. But does one
measure a single sporting event, or the number of people who watch a game over
the year?
The only time a billion people have watched a single sporting-related
event was the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, according
to futures sport+entertainment, a consultancy. In fact it
is the most-watched TV programme of all time. Still, I don’t think a cutesy
Chinese kid lip-synching a sickly song about how the world
is one happy family really counts as sport.
Kevin Alavy, the director
of futures sport+entertainment, says that “broadly speaking, the FIFA World Cup
and the Summer Olympics are by far the two most-watched sporting events, with
the UEFA European Championships ranked third. There’s then quite a large gap
to…the FIA Formula One World Championship, NFL Super Bowl and the IOC Winter
Olympics.”
So where does cricket fit
in? By these figures it seems preposterous to advance it as the world’s second
favourite. However, the number of people watching its showpiece, the World Cup
Final, is wholly dependent on whether India has made it through. It would be of
little surprise to me if, in a non-Olympic or World Cup summer, this year’s
final between India and Sri Lanka—in Mumbai—was the most-watched sporting event
in 2011.
Yet I don’t think these
one-offs are a good indicator. In 2008, the second-most watched sporting event
(not featuring cutesy kids and the like) was a volleyball game between China
and Cuba. I’ve accidentally sat through a baseball game on television. But I’m
not a fan and I don’t want my name chalked up alongside it when awards for
popularity are handed out.
Which leaves us with the
notion of “regular” viewers. Here, cricket might be a viable contender for
second. What is important is not that it is a global sport—very few countries
give a hoot about it—but that it is phenomenally popular in two places, India
and Pakistan, whose combined population makes up over a fifth of the world’s
total. In contrast, American football attracts little attention outside the
United States, which has just a quarter of India’s population.
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário