The Burden of Information: Why Some Sports Are More Popular than Others
Three sports have long dominated in the United States: football, basketball, and baseball. Why? It’s all in the numbers.
In the 21st century, we’ve reached a time when access to sport, while still not perfect, has expanded to the point where youth can choose to play a variety of different sports.
Television and the media have rapidly increased coverage of sports as a whole and the Olympic movement has provided a regular, global audience to emerging and niche sports, in addition to the traditional mainstays.
Yet, throughout society, and particularly at the professional level, it’s obvious that the popularity of individual sports is uneven. In the United States, three sports: football, basketball, and baseball have long dominated the landscape.
It’s a fact that goes relatively unquestioned. Although you will sometimes see hockey added to form a “Big 4” or talk of the growth of soccer, there is little doubt that football, basketball, and baseball drive the American sports machine. Some others show up during an important event, or when something amazing happens, while others seem to be shut out entirely.
Of course, it’s only natural for some sports to be more popular than others — to have more fans, participants, TV viewership, etc.
But why these three sports in particular?
One answer, and certainly one with a large degree of truth, is simply historical longevity. Sports that have been around for longer have had more opportunity to grow their fanbases, develop and perfect their rules, and achieve financial stability and a degree of legitimacy.
People are more likely to follow sports they grew up playing and watching and enroll their children in them down the line. The NFL is currently celebrating its 100th season, while professional baseball has been around since the 1870s, with the game being played even before that. These sports are ancient.
Basketball is relatively younger, with its major growth taking place in the last half-century. This explains why basketball fans are younger, and the sport has been somewhat of a late addition to the group of powerhouses. It also lends credence to the longevity theory, as it took time for it to become as culturally dominant as it is.
There’s more to it than just longevity, though. If there wasn’t, we’d see ritualistic games dating back thousands of years taking the center stage. I think there’s another reason why certain sports become popular in the first place and continue to draw new fans as generations go by — one that has to do with numbers.
Sports and numbers have an interdependence that goes far beyond the tallies on a scoreboard. Part of the mass appeal of sports is the multitude of ways the actions players perform can be tracked and analyzed, all of which require large volumes of statistics.
Particular in our modern analytics revolution, we look for every single possible aspect of a sport to be analyzed and charted, with teams employing analytics specialists to find any possible edge over their opponents.
Football, basketball, and baseball already had a large number of statistics. For example, quarterbacks were charted by passing yards, passer rating, touchdowns, interceptions, completion percentage, yards per attempt, etc. Now we can measure these things with different personnel groupings against specific defensive formations, at certain times of the game, at different places on the field, depending on how much time they had in the pocket. It can get overwhelming quickly, especially with the advanced metrics now being used in these sports.
Now, during a primetime NFL broadcast, when the players are being introduced, viewers can see their Pro Football Focus (PFF) position grade, ranking their performance against other players at the same position using a formula that goes over the head of just about everyone watching.
Perhaps no events showcase our obsession with raw data more than the NFL and NBA combines, where pro hopefuls are measured in several different ways — height and weight, 40-yard dash time, bench press, broad jump, vertical leap, etc. Before these guys are even drafted, we put them through the wringer (don’t forget pre-draft workouts and Pro Days) to get the whole story on them. But at the end of the day, most of it revolves around numbers.
What makes all of this even more interesting is that teams then have to figure out how to construct the most efficient teams possible within money constraints. In the NFL and NBA, teams operate under a salary cap.
In MLB, there is no direct salary cap (although there is a luxury tax), but financially, teams have different amounts they can spend (international soccer also functions in this way), meaning teams still need to be smart. Cue Billy Beane and the Moneyball A’s, who brought this type of thinking into the mainstream.
The need for players with different positions and different skill sets naturally leads to teams forming their own strategies and playstyles, increasing the overall complexity of the sport.
Complexity is a really important word here because that’s what it all comes down to. Having more statistics and more variables in the mix allows for more ways to quantify skill and overall greatness, more ways to communicate this information to fans, and more potential to craft narratives.
Sports like soccer and lacrosse have been slow to catch on in the U.S. by comparison. To the uninformed, these games can look like a bunch of running around, where sometimes people score. (Although, I would like to shoutout Premier League Lacrosse on what appears to be a strong debut season.)
There aren’t as many numbers whizzing by you on a broadcast, and while they can still use many of the new ways of measuring players, these areas (like player tracking) haven’t been available for very long. While these games are anything but simple, from a basic statistical standpoint, they have been put at a large disadvantage.
An increase in quantifiable and easily understood statistics seems to contribute to the popularity of our major sports. There are some other factors as well. Sport longevity was already mentioned, but career longevity is important also, allowing a sport’s best and most marketable athletes to carry the sport for longer periods.
Emerging sports would also do well to ensure frequent competition, with a longer season spanning a healthy portion of the year and putting the best players and teams against each other often, which inevitably leads to rivalries. This is a problem with many Olympic sports, which seem to disappear outside of a few weeks every four years.
Overall, though, one common link among many of the less-common sports is that they have been burdened by a lack of information — stats, variables, and narratives that draw people in and keep them engaged. Outstanding performances can make some inroads but for these sports, the popularity ceiling may be capped.
Connor Groel is a writer who studies sport management at the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as editor of the Top Level Sports publication on Medium, and the host of the Connor Groel Sports podcast. You can follow Connor on Medium, Facebook, and Twitter, and view his archives at toplevelsports.net.
