Sports Leagues Popularity

As my bots continue to bring me data from all across the interwebs I am constantly thinking about interesting questions to ask it.

As I have been focused on numbers generated by various sports leagues I began to wonder about the popularity of these various leagues themselves…

The Popularity of Sports Leagues

For this list I simply counted the number of mentions each league had in my collected data.  While not the most scientific method it should give us a fairly good idea of the popularity of each league online.

My data is scraped from a wide variety of sites from across the web.  The list of sites I collect data from is largely U.S. based now since I have no idea what the EU is trying to do with their new crazy rules…

The NFL Still Rules

That being the case, it is of little surprise to me that the NFL is the most popular sports league today.  You might think that is would be less popular since it is the off season but the combine, draft, etc. is on the horizon which stokes interest.

The NBA is closing in tho…  I do not have the data but I imagine that the NBA would show steady growth, not to mention a steady closing of the margin vs. The NFL over the past few years.

The NFL and the NBA dwarf every other league:

1	NFL	37470	National Football League
2	NBA	31731	National Basketball Association
3	NHL	13326	National Hockey League
4	MLB	12560	Major League Baseball
5	UFC	11711	Ultimate Fighting Championship
6	WWE	10557	World Wrestling Entertainment
7	Olympics	9916	International Olympic Committee
8	NASCAR	7527	National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing
9	Premier	5329	The Premier League
10	AAF	5222	The Alliance of American Football
11	PGA	5082	Professional Golfers’ Association
12	WNBA	2445	The Women’s National Basketball Association
13	F1	2346	Formula One
14	NHRA	1371	The National Hot Rod Association
15	SEC	1260	NCAA Southeastern Conference
16	WBA	1241	World Boxing Association
17	ACC	1079	NCAA Atlantic Coast Conference
18	WTA	918	Women’s Tennis Association
19	XFL	858	X Football League
20	PBA	843	Professional Bowlers Association
21	FIFA	689	The Federation Internationale de Football Association
22	WBO	658	World Boxing Orginization
23	UEFA	551	Union of European Football Associations
24	lpga	345	Ladies Professional Golfers’ Association
25	ISL	312	Indian Super League

People in the U.S. love football so much that there are three pro football leagues on this list and one of them is not even functional at this point.

It’s interesting that Tennis is the only sport where the women are more popular than the men.  Men’s tennis cannot even rank ahead of the Indian Super ( soccer ) League…

And while we are on the topic – Major League Baseball wtf?

I know opening day is still down the road and hockey is in season, but that is ridiculous.  MLB makes money  but nobody with a straight face can claim that it is on par with the NFL or NBA these days in terms of popularity.

My final comment is about boxing.  Once upon a time the heavy-weight champion was the most famous athlete in the world.  Can you even name the current champ?    Maybe if Anthony Joshua defeats Deontay Wilder and unifies the titles it’ll make a dent in the public zeitgeist.

Alternatively the UFC just continues to gain popularity.  I would not be surprised at all if it passes Major League Baseball at some point…