Originally Posted By: twosleepy
I found this site: http://ezinearticles.com/?Most-Popular-Sports-Around-The-World&id=551180 which has some interesting surprises. The rankings are based on participants + watchers, which seems fair. Baseball comes out around 7th, tied with a bunch. What do you think?


Sounds reasonable, though of course there are many such sites with conflicting lists. Surprises me that Basketball doesn't rank higher, though I guess when you think about it, at the very most only 15,000 at a time can watch a basketball match, and that would be in the top stadiums alone, so it's limited by the nature of the venue in terms of spectacting. If you take TV audiences relatively more into account I'm sure it would be higher.

Some sports like ping pong are only up there because they are played in the world's most populous country.

Field Hockey is one I'd forgotten about. North Americans may be surprised to know that it outranks baseball, but most of the rest of the English speaking world and most of non-English speaking Europe and most of Asia play it avidly. Here in Australia "hockey" means field hockey and the sub-zero version is something exotic to us. We're not so "hot" on what we call "ice hockey".