I saw an infographic showing the rise of football, so I wanted to compare it with other sports in the past 100 years in the U.S.

Based on this data, football is far more appropriate to be called “America’s sport” than baseball.

For each year, the values for baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer are normalized to sum to 100%. So, if baseball is at “40” in 1950, that means in the model it represented ~40% of the total popularity share among the five sports considered.

Sources: Gallup Historical Polls (Sports), Wikipedia’s (History of Sports in the U.S.)
Tools: Python / Matplotlib

Posted by XsLiveInTexas

31 comments

  1. it would be interesting to overlay the data for Canada as well to compare them

  2. I’m really surprised soccer is more popular than hockey in the US. I don’t know a single person who watches MLS, but id say a third of my friends are really into NHL.

    I also wonder how MMA factors into this now. I feel like that has gained a ton of popularity in the last decade

  3. Soccer passing baseball in the US is such an alien thought

  4. Baseball isn’t called America’s Sport. It’s called America’s Past time. Which still seems appropriate.

  5. I’m colour-blind, Is nfl or basketball first (I assume its the nfl)

  6. Actually kinda crazy that despite the NFL’s dominance with tv ratings today, it isn’t omnipresent the way baseball was before the 70s.

  8. Am I wrong in thinking baseball has recently made up some ground since they made the games shorter?

  9. This is definitely not beautiful data, with all due respect.

  10. It’s so hard to watch a baseball game of your team on tv

  11. Baseball was popular because it‘s easy to follow along by radio. It was so popular in fact, that during ww2 the US would use baseball trivia to root out foreign assets/spies. Imagine being the one US soldier who genuinely just didn’t like baseball and getting cooked by your own country for it.

  14. Since I can’t find the exact methodology, I wonder if “Soccer” viewership includes European/English leagues. I can name a handful of bars where I live that are dedicated Arsenal/Liverpool/Man U watch pubs. Could be skewing the data for soccer being above hockey/almost on par with baseball

  15. Would be interesting to see how boxing and mma compare to these

  16. How is this data collected or presented? Basketball being essentially flat or slightly up from the 90’s seems off to me. Doesn’t seem today’s ratings are  anywhere near as high of ratings back then. 

  17. I assume it’s different depending on the region. There are a lot of people on the coasts and I wouldn’t be surprised based on demographics if that’s where a majority of soccer fans are.

  18. There’s something missing in this graph. The accumulative index in 1920 exceeds 90. The accumulative index in 2020 is ~ 75. So we are missing 15 points on the index. Is there another category that explains this?

  20. The NHL is so incompetently run. Imagine having the speed of basketball (and then some), the drama of soccer, and unpredictability of baseball, and not being able to sell that effectively.

  21. I think this might be somewhat misleading. If I’m understanding it correctly, an increase in popularity of one sport means a decrease in another, since they are percentage of marketshare. But I’m not sure how well this would reflect people being fans of multiple sports.

  22. It’s kind of crazy that how omnipresent football is it’s only half as popular as baseball at its peak. Seems kind of hard to believe if I’m honest.

  23. I can’t find a Gallup poll that backs this data up? Soccer overtaking hockey in the 1970s doesn’t pass the smell test, and the Gallup polls I see don’t have Soccer overtaking hockey until the 2010s

  24. NHL is in such a disgraceful state right now. Even e-sport is more popular than hockey.

  27. I’m surprised not to see an uptick after Baseball added the pitch clock a few years ago. That really did bring a lot of viewership back to the sport, I thought? I swear I read that its viewership had turned around after that was implemented.

  29. Boxing should have been included and maybe nascar. Otherwise maybe say team sports.

  30. Soccer is going to surpass baseball within the next 10 years, and it may pass basketball in the next 20. Both MLB and NBA seasons are too long.

  31. makes sense, out of every sport on earth baseball ranks just above watching paint dry as the most boring sport on earth

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