[image source: ESPNW]

There is no truly objective way to answer this question. Everyone will have different answers, maybe even different answers for different times. During the playoffs, the NBA might be the greatest, but nothing compares to the Super Bowl, right? I’m here today to give you my pick for the greatest overall sport.

Soccer.

Soccer, or Football if you’re from Europe or…anywhere besides America, is the greatest sport. I’ll try to explain why I think that.

It is almost impossible to put objective data behind what is the greatest sport in the world. Soccer would win almost any data-driven contest, though. Soccer (or association football) has the highest amount of fans of any sport. In a recent survey, 43% of people said they follow soccer. The NBA was the second highest with 36%. (source) It’s no question that soccer is the most popular sport, but it isn’t the most popular in America so we often overlook it. We forget that people in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa care WAY more about soccer than any other sport, besides maybe Cricket.

Normal soccer leagues worldwide do not have a tournament similar to the NFL, so it is hard to compare viewership numbers for one big game. The best we can do is look at the UEFA Champion’s League Final to compare it with the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl this year had 103.4 million viewers (source). By the more conservative of estimates, the Champions League Final had 165 million viewers. (source). The NBA Finals Game 1 (before people stopped caring) drew 13.6 million viewers (source). I saw a stat that I now can’t find that said a game between Manchester United and Liverpool in 2015 had 500 million viewers, easily beating that year’s Super Bowl. I won’t bother looking it up, but I can almost guarantee a random Premier League game between two good teams has a larger viewership than any random NFL or NBA  game between two teams. Any way you look at it, soccer has the highest viewership numbers of any sport.

Sport, at its heart, is all about making money. Let’s look at the most profitable sporting leagues in the world. It looks like the American leagues will take this because Americans love to spend money. I’ll give it to the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys are still, somehow, the most profitable sports franchise in the world. After that, three soccer teams: Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona (source). The NFL leads the most profitable sports leagues in the world by revenue with the Premier League coming in fourth (source). However, the NFL is just one league. If you combined all of the soccer leagues on the list, all 14 out of the 20, the soccer leagues pull in a combined $19.442 billion, making them the most profitable (source). The Premier League does rank third, behind the NBA and NFL, in the most lucrative TV contracts in the world (source).

Sports are nothing without the people playing the sport. Let’s see who has the highest number of worldwide players. With no research, I’m willing to bet it’s soccer. According to a recent census undertaken by FIFA, 265 million people and 5 million refs participate in soccer. That’s about 4% of the world’s population and is definitely the most played sport in the world (source).

The scariest part about these numbers for the other sports is just how much room soccer has to grow. Soccer has been and continues to be the dominant sport in Europe, South America, and Africa. But it has never been the most popular in two of the world’s largest countries: the U.S.A. and China. That could be changing. In both countries, only 32% of those polled expressed interest in soccer, with young people being far more likely to follow it than their parents. The beautiful game is growing among young people in two of the highest populated countries in the world. The NFL, by comparison, is losing viewership and players. (source)

I can hear it now, everyone saying: “Just because it’s the most popular doesn’t make it the best.” I agree, completely. That is just the closest we can come to putting objective numbers to the question. We can’t measure fun and enjoyment in numbers, but we can measure viewership and money. It’s a start at least.

Even if you look at subjective factors, I still think soccer is the greatest sport in the world.

It is easily the best sport to play. You do not need an insane amount of equipment to play it correctly, like Football. You don’t need to be a genetic freak to have any hope of being good at it, like Basketball. You don’t need to be old and white er…sorry, have acres of open fields to play it, like Golf. All you need is a ball. That’s it. Grab a ball and a few friends and you’re playing. It is the easiest game to play similarly to how the pros play. Sure, you can grab a football and play two-hand touch with your friends, but you’re not playing the way the NFL does. You can throw a baseball back and forth, but you’re not playing the way the MLB does. But, just with a ball and some sticks for goal posts, you can play quite similarly to how the soccer professionals play. There’s also the added factor of safety. There’s no denying it is far safer to play than football. Also, anyone can become good with enough hard work. That isn’t necessarily true of football, certainly not of basketball, and only slightly true of baseball.

Comparing what sport is the most fun to watch is really difficult because it’s all about context. Watching my favorite NFL team is going to be more fun than watching a random soccer match up. Watching two good NFL teams is going to be more fun than watching two sub-par soccer teams. It’s all very context driven, so I’ll try to take that aspect out as best as I can.

If you take two mid-to-low table Premier League teams, two roughly .500 NFL teams, and two not-playoff bound NBA teams, none of them teams I care about at all, and give me the choice, I’m probably watching the NBA game. Basketball is high energy and constant excitement. In that situation, I’d argue it is the most fun sport to watch.

HOWEVER, soccer has some great things going for it in terms of watchability:

1. It’s super simple to understand. My wife, in the course of one USL season, has gone from not knowing how soccer is played at all, to giving her opinions on who should be starting over who. It’s very easy to understand the rules and catch on to strategy. No one understands the rules of the NFL and basketball strategy is kind of nonexistent (We should score and not let them score. Give it to Lebron, let’s go!).
2. There are no commercials. For the love of God, the commercials in American sports! It’s obnoxious. I don’t have the stats, but I think you spend more time watching commercials than the game.
3. Soccer has the highest level of actual play time amongst the sports, besides maybe hockey. How often is the ball actually moving in the NFL? How often is there a stoppage of play or free throws in the NBA? The clock never stops in soccer, there is always something going on.
4. The clock never stops, so you know exactly how long a game will be. The last two minutes of a basketball game could take 4 hours. A football game takes up your entire afternoon. A soccer game will take 95 minutes for game time, give or take a couple minutes difference for added time, a 15-minute halftime and that’s it. You can plan around that.
5. Since it is so easy to play and understand, it is more evidently impressive when someone does something well. A linebacker could do a great job blocking, but very few people have tried being a linebacker, so no one is going to catch on to that really. A Wide Reciever might run a great route, but no one cares if he doesn’t catch the ball. By comparison, in soccer, everyone knows how hard it is to stop a speeding ball with your feet. It’s way easier to be impressed by the little things.

More than watching one game, I think the biggest question to ask in deciding which sport is the best to watch is which sport would you want to follow a team through a whole season the most?

The NFL is out. It is an inherently hard to watch sport. Play is hardly ever actually happening. Penalties are such a huge factor. The amount of commercials is absurd. It is really hard to get into and fully understand as beginners. They all wear helmets and heavy pads, making it pretty difficult to recognize favorite players. It is not a watchable sport. The one thing the NFL has going for it is every win and loss feels important.

The NBA and MLB are out. There are far too many games for any single game to matter. I’m not going to watch every Nuggets game, even though I’m a Nuggets fan. There isn’t one day a week for MLB games that I can look forward to. I can’t make predictions and think about a game for an entire week leading up to it like I can for the NFL or soccer. If my team loses it’s not a big deal. I can not pay attention until the last month of the season and not feel like I missed anything.

Soccer is the most fun sport to follow. The watchability of the game paired with the fact that every win and loss matters, paired with the fact that they, besides cups and stuff, only play on the weekends makes it the best sport to follow for a season.

I’ve written for a long time setting up my argument and I think I’ve done it as well as I can. Now it is time for me to defend that argument against common issues Americans have with soccer.

• The play is boring.

That is hard to refute since its completely subjective. I’d argue that if you follow a team and genuinely care about them winning, it’s not boring at all. The more you watch, the less boring it is.

• There are so few goals and we want to watch for goals

I really have to give them that. There does seem to be minimal scoring in soccer. It’s not uncommon for games to end 1-0 or 0-0 and those games can get kind of boring. But you can’t tell me there aren’t boring games in football too.

In defense of low scoring games: it adds to the excitement. If my team is down 0-1 or it’s 0-0, there is a chance for my team to come back and win no matter how much time is left. We’re into stoppage time? There’s still a chance. It only takes a quarter of a second for the ball to cross the goal line, anything can happen.

And in the NBA, where points are abundant, it cheapens the feeling of scoring. I don’t care that my team made a basket because they have to do that 50 more times. In soccer, every goal is celebrated with fervor.

Also, I’d argue that the NFL also doesn’t have that much scoring, they just hide it better by making the scores a crazy number of points. For example, Arsenal played this weekend in the premier league and won 3-1. That would be 21-7 in the NFL, which isn’t that low of a scoreline. The Redskins beat the Cowboys 20-17. In soccer scores, with rounding, that would be about 3-2, which is not an uncommon scoreline in soccer.

• It can, and often does, end in a draw.

This is the most common argument I hear against soccer and I don’t get it. Most of the people with that argument would say that football is the best sport, which can also end in a draw. It is more common in soccer, so we’ll pretend it can’t happen in football.

I was in the camp of not liking draws for a long time. I was raised in the American sports culture, I was taught that every game needs a winner and a loser. But now I am wiser.

First: just because a game ends in a draw doesn’t mean there wasn’t a winner and a loser. If the top team in the Premier League, Manchester City, played the bottom team in the league, Newcastle, at home and they drew? That’s a win for Newcastle. That means they did something really well and stole a point. That’s a loss for MC. That means they dropped points at home against a bad team.

Second: Not every game needs a winner. Especially with the way the points system works in soccer. Sometimes two teams play each other so closely that forcing them to keep playing until one team eventually scrapes out a win is, honestly, kind of pathetic. They both deserve a point, but neither deserves three points. That’s fine to admit. I don’t understand this “Every game needs a winner!” mentality. It’s okay to draw.

 

So that is my answer to the question. I didn’t expect it to be this long, but this is a big topic. Feel free to let me know how you disagree with me in the comments.