Poll on Sports Popularity in U.S.

Gotham Gator

Gotham Gator

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Football reigns king, but has been dropping in recent years.
Baseball is plummeting.
Basketball continues it’s steady pace.
Soccer is at its highest ever and is now more popular than baseball for people under 55 and tied in 2nd place with basketball for people under 34.

http://news.gallup.com/poll/224864/football-americans-favorite-sport-watch.aspx

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Interesting. One limitation on interpreting this: the data only shows favorite sport, which is important. It's good for soccer that it is growing under that metric. But for how many people is soccer their second favorite sport? My guess is that if you asked people to list their top 3 favorite sports to watch, the results for soccer are dismal compared to this poll. But that is admittedly a guess.

PS: I am a highly rare person according to this.
 
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adam said:
What happened to hockey?
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Hockey came in at 4%.

Take a look at the Baseball - Soccer Trends

2013 Baseball 14% Soccer 4%
2017 Baseball 9% Soccer 7%

Will somebody inform conventional wisdom that the big 4 sports in America are NFL, Basketball, Baseball and Soccer? If you want to expand the Big 4 to the Big 5 then you can talk about hockey.

[Click through Survey methodology in Gator's link to get a .pdf of the full results]
 
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Gotham Gator said:
Football reigns king, but has been dropping in recent years.
Baseball is plummeting.
Basketball continues it’s steady pace.
Soccer is at its highest ever and is now more popular than baseball for people under 55 and tied in 2nd place with basketball for people under 34.

http://news.gallup.com/poll/224864/football-americans-favorite-sport-watch.aspx

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That's interesting but they're maybe not asking the right question. I'd like to see viewership numbers superimposed on top of this. I mean, asking people what they like is not at all the same as asking what they do. I could love Australian rugby all I want but there aren't going to be 100 million people watching it on TV every weekend. And if you ask people if they're for or against violence at least 90% would say "against" I'd think but when you compare that to the numbers that watch boxing, WWE, UFC, or heck, even hockey, you'll have a different view of that question.

I'm all for soccer of course but if you ask people what they like you'll end up with different answers than if you ask them what they do. And even then you may have to check what they actually do vs. what they say they do.

And, uh, yes, I did take a number of testing courses in psych, industrial psych, and in sociology in college. Why do you ask?
 
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Seth said:
That's interesting but they're maybe not asking the right question. I'd like to see viewership numbers superimposed on top of this. I mean, asking people what they like is not at all the same as asking what they do. I could love Australian rugby all I want but there aren't going to be 100 million people watching it on TV every weekend. And if you ask people if they're for or against violence at least 90% would say "against" I'd think but when you compare that to the numbers that watch boxing, WWE, UFC, or heck, even hockey, you'll have a different view of that question.

I'm all for soccer of course but if you ask people what they like you'll end up with different answers than if you ask them what they do. And even then you may have to check what they actually do vs. what they say they do.

And, uh, yes, I did take a number of testing courses in psych, industrial psych, and in sociology in college. Why do you ask?
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This poll is an open ended question. Everybody who wants to answer rugby, bowling or fishing can do so. Its not the most revealing poll but gallup has been polling the same question for 80 years which gives the responses over time more significance -- the jump in soccer appears to be meaningful especially because the popularity is entirely in the younger demographics.
 
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To provide needed context, the question was “What is your favorite sport to watch?”

The article mentioned that soccer’s level of 7% was the highest any sport had gotten beside the Big 3, with the exception of auto racing, which also hit 7% in 1997.

I think there is truth to the suggestion by mgarbowski mgarbowski that soccer is probably not the 2nd or 3rd choice of as many people as other sports - for many, it’s either first or pretty far down the list.

It is important to remember that popularity for soccer does not translate directly into popularity for MLS. People who primarily watch leagues outside the U.S. don’t just represent a big portion, but are a sizable majority of American soccer fans. The challenge for MLS is to convert these fans to watching their domestic league. The recent and ongoing improvement in quality will hopefully help, but there is a real cultural hipsterism that will be hard to overcome.
 
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The most watched soccer league in the US is Liga MX. There is a missing factor in all of this and it is the growth of Central Americans as part of the US Population
 
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I found this stat interesting. That is quite a large jump.

And for all spectator sports in the U.S., there is one other sobering statistic to consider. The number of Americans who say they do not have a favorite sport has grown from 8% in 2000 to 15% now -- an increase larger than for any sport during that time.
 
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ferrarinycfc said:
I found this stat interesting. That is quite a large jump.

And for all spectator sports in the U.S., there is one other sobering statistic to consider. The number of Americans who say they do not have a favorite sport has grown from 8% in 2000 to 15% now -- an increase larger than for any sport during that time.
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I find this whole discussion fascinating. I'd like to see a graph of increasing "no favorite sport" people vs decreasing cable subscribers, for example. Football and Nascar might be in trouble over the long term, but then we have "new" sports like UFC that seem to be growing. When I was a kid boxing was huge, now it's anything but.

One of the things I loved about Star Trek: Deep Space 9, although it was just a small thing, was that Sisko kept a baseball on his desk and always played with it. Except that nobody else knew what it was! In 400 years baseball was more or less forgotten except by this one person.
 
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adam said:
What happened to hockey?
Click to expand...

I wonder if it is changing demographics? Our country is becoming less white and it could just be a shift in the make-up of the population
 
Kjbert said:
I wonder if it is changing demographics? Our country is becoming less white and it could just be a shift in the make-up of the population
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If you look at some of the underlying data, hockey has never been all that high, and never as high as soccer in the latest survey.
 
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