Hello Azlan
This is a very tricky question to answer definitively because a lot of
the evidence is anecdotal or assumed and I expect the answer to be
controversial! It is also tricky as to when you say someone is
actually playing a sport, by this I mean does a young child kicking a
ball around a field qualify as playing soccer?
If you do a search on the internet it frequently mentions soccer as
the most popular sport, which I must admit I suspected the answer to
be, but rarely is this assertion supported by any figures and when
they are they are lower than quoted for other sports.
Therefore for your most popular sport list I have attempted to
discover the most popular sport by *registered* players around the
world.
These figures have been compiled by and recovered from the
International Federation of the sport involved in 2002. The number of
National Federations was obtained from the International Olympic
Committee. This work was originally done here:
http://www.johann-sandra.com/popular.htm
I have edited this list to only include the Olympic sports as the
question dictates.
Rank Sport No of participants No of National Federations
# 1 Volleyball 998,000,000 218
# 2 Basketball 400,000,000 211
# 3 Table Tennis 300,000,000 186
# 4 Soccer/Football 242,000,000 204
# 5 Badminton 200,000,000 147
# 6 Tennis 60,000,000 191
# 7 Baseball 60,000,000 110
# 8 Handball 18,000,000 147
# 9 Hockey 3,000,000 118
#10 Judo 2,500,000 187
It could also be argued that that list should be ordered on the number of
national federations rather than the number of participants because the
numbers would be skewed because of the sizes of certain countries taking
part in certain sports.
The order may seem a little unusual to you depending on what part of
the world you come from, for instance I expected football to be top as
it is the most popular sport from my country but when looking at the
sports above it in the list I can see why they would beat soccer as I
have played all of these sports at one time or another as well.
A similar question regarding the sport with the most spectators was
recently asked at Google Answers:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=16866
The sport with the most spectators is probably an even more difficult
question to answer as many viewers are unrecorded with regards to
un-televised or amateur sports.
If you have any further questions on this answer please ask for
clarification and I will do my best to help. |
Clarification of Answer by
palitoy-ga
on
28 Jun 2004 06:35 PDT
I have been looking into this in more detail for you and it is evident
that the question needs to be defined exactly otherwise it may or may
not be able to be answered without big assumptions. How do you
calculate the viewing figures per sport? Is that a cumulative number
of viewers per event or an average of only people watching at the
Olympics? For instance in the case of football, almost all football
fans in the UK will watch their teams at the World Cup but would be
less interested in them playing at the Olympics (because of the
restrictions of the tournament at the Olympics), this would mean that
football would seem less popular than it really is. How do you
account for the differences in Women's sport and Men's sport?
There are no accessible individual records of viewing figures of each
event at the Olympics for each nation, to the best of my knowledge the
IOC have not released this information. The answer is further
complicated by the fact that each nation does not televise every
sport, for instance in the UK you would be lucky to see any coverage
of the volleyball even though it is the most popular sport in the
world according to the number of registered players. This makes it
difficult to make any meaningful assumptions.
I also believe that the televised viewing figures would not give you
the most popular sport in the world as it is still common in some
nations for households not to have TV sets or to share TV sets. The
results would be heavily skewed in favour of the nations with the most
TV sets (eg the USA and the developed world) giving an unfair
advantage to sports liked in those countries.
If you required this answer the amount of research it would require
would far outweigh the current value of the question and I would
suggest reposting it with a larger value as per the Google Answers
guidelines:
http://answers.google.com/answers/pricing.html
As a rough guide to this I have already spent 75-90 minutes
researching the answer to your original question of the most popular
sport ranked by popularity and to your revised question of popularity
ranked by TV viewing figures. Changing that question to ranking by TV
viewing figures means a lot more research will need to be done which I
do not think I can justify spending at the current question price.
According to the information I have been able to find so far, football
is the most watched sports event (the World Cup with over 2 billion
viewers for certain matches alone, the cumulative figure over the
tournament would exceed 10 billion) whilst badminton was the
second-most watched sport at the Sydney Olympics (according to the
official Olympics factsheet). There are though no viewing figures
given and no indication of what was first or the viewing figures of
football at the Olympics (which is likely to be less popular than the
World Cup as it is essentially an under-21 tournament). The recent
Test matches between India and Pakistan also had viewing figures in
the high hundreds of millions or billions (depending on who you
believe, but again no definitive answer as there are too many
broadcasting companies involved with advertising revenue to earn).
I hope from this you can see from this clarification that a sports
popularity based upon TV viewing figures is not the best gauge as to
the sports popularity and that the task of compiling this data is near
on impossible for global TV figures.
If you wish to proceed with this answer I would strongly suggest
reporting the question with a higher value attached and a specific
detailed question as to your exact answer requirements.
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