by Jasper Gilley
Sports are a thing that a lot of people spend a lot of time and mental energy caring about. Generally, I think I care about them about as much as the average person – there are some sports/teams that I follow somewhat seriously, and I’ll watch the finals of maybe 1 or 2 sports each year, but I am (with some exceptions) a fair weather fan otherwise. Because sports tend to occupy a place in many humans’ psyche comparable to what I’d imagine religion did back in the day, I’ve decided it would be a good idea to directly compare said quasi-religions. I’m not going to compare sports in a fun Wikipedia-approved way that’s designed to respect everyone’s feelings, either. I’m going to make a pronouncement about which sports are objectively better than others. What could possibly go wrong?
First, some boundaries on the scope of this discussion. I’ll only compare the world’s major team sports, since those are the ones about which people care the most, and I’m aiming to make the highest possible number of people very indignant. Specifically, I’ll consider:
- (American) Football
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Hockey
- Soccer (known to non-Americans and a few very pretentious Americans as ‘football’)
If you’re feeling indignant already because your sport was left out, this wasn’t just an arbitrary collection of sports I felt like considering – this is the list of the five most popular team sports in the world by revenue.
I’ll rank these sports by the following metrics, in order of importance:
- Physical interesting-ness
- Elegance
- Monotony, or lack thereof
- Other factors that make the sport more interesting
Without further ado, the definitive ranking of the world’s five most popular team sports. Please don’t mail me any bombs out of vitriolic anger that I’ve deemed your favorite sport bad. I’ll proceed with my discussion first on the basis of the aforementioned criteria, then give quantitative rankings.
Physical Interesting-ness
In most situations in most walks of life, you do not regularly witness 300-pound men knocking each other over, nor projectiles being thrown unaided at 105 mph, nor people running around extremely quickly. Ideally, sports provide you with an opportunity to witness such phenomena. American Football (henceforth referred to mononymously as ‘football’) baseball, and hockey dominate this metric. Baseball offers interesting projectile-related physical phenomena in abundance: in addition to 105-mph pitches, it offers 450-foot home runs, plus decent amounts of unusually fast running. Football also offers many interesting physical phenomena, as does hockey (slap shots can travel about as fast as MLB pitches, apparently.) Soccer, however, is much more physically mundane: the most exciting thing that can happen is a ball being kicked a few dozen meters into a goal, and its players cannot run around as fast as those of football (because of endurance/longevity considerations.) Basketball is abysmally bad by the metric of physical interesting-ness. Its most exciting event, a slam dunk, involves nothing more than a tall guy jumping a bit and flamboyantly placing a ball in a hole. If I was 6’6”, I could surely duplicate these results with maybe half an hour of practicing.
Elegance
What makes a sport elegant? I don’t mean aesthetic elegance; this is a fairly subjective matter (as opposed to the bastion of objectivity that is the rest of this post.) Rather, I think that any elegant sport generally lacks contrived/arbitrary rules and has minimal need for subjective officiation. Perhaps coextensively, an elegant sport should flow naturally out of its defining characteristics. For example, soccer has one major rule: don’t touch the ball with your hands. Beyond this, there aren’t a lot of exception clauses or additional rules, as far as I know (besides “don’t tackle other players too violently.”) Baseball, being the only sport on this list played on a non-rectangular field, can also be considered elegant: while it’s not as simple a sport as soccer, all of its components fit together very nicely, and the sample size is large enough that few called strikes or balls decided the outcome of the game, minimizing the effect that officiation has on the outcomes of games. I don’t know a lot about the intricacies of hockey, but it seems close to as elegant as soccer since I don’t think there are a whole lot of stipulations about what you can’t do. Football, however, is not a terribly elegant sport. There are many rules about who can tackle whom in what sort of a manner and about who can throw the ball to whom and from where. It’s also not a terribly uncommon occurrence to see a football game decided by the whims of the referees. Basketball once again seems to bring up the rear in this category, though. In one year of sporadically watching March Madness, for example, I saw the outcome of at least two games decided by referee whims, and because there aren’t any natural stopping points (as there are in football and baseball), video replays don’t play a factor in correcting for bad calls. It also doesn’t help that because basketball is inherently offense-biased (as compared to football, soccer, or hockey), one team has to be vastly better than the other to produce a point differential great enough to not be jeopardized by some bad calls.
Monotony
While watching 300-pound men knock each other over is physically interesting, if a football game consisted entirely of offensive and defensive linemen pushing each other, it would quickly become boring. Likewise, if baseball consisted of nothing other than batters trying to hit home runs (i.e., a home run derby), it would also be boring (there’s a reason that there are ≈1500 baseball games each season but only one home run derby.) Thus, we need to account for the variance in the physical interesting-ness of a sport as well as the physical interesting-ness itself. Football wins out in this category. There are just too many things that it’s interesting to watch: the multiple methods of scoring (touchdowns, field goals, safeties, two-point conversions), good offensive play (throws, catches, runs), and good defensive play (interceptions, sacks, tackles.) Importantly, these are all physically varied: a sack is about as interesting as a good catch to watch, but they involve completely separate mechanics. Baseball is also physically varied, having multiple elements of physical interest (home runs, curveballs, fastballs, good catches.) While some people (usually non-sports fans) complain that baseball is boring to watch, I’d argue that they say this because baseball can move slowly, which is distinct from its being monotonous. All of hockey, soccer, and basketball have similar levels of monotony: in each, the scoring mechanics are reasonably interesting, but all other interest comes from the positioning of the players, which most people who haven’t played the sport at a high-ish level won’t be able to pick up on. I therefore rank them below football and baseball in monotonousness.
Other factors that make the sport more interesting
Pro sports are only so interesting: they require some degree of being a ‘sports person’, and some regional identity from which to subsequently take on a team identity. If one doesn’t already identify as a sports person, it can be difficult to see the rationale in rooting for your local pro sports team. Some sports, however, have sizable contingents of teams that aren’t technically pro sports teams but still play the game at a high level and are easy to root for. In many cases, this alternate identity makes it easier for non-sports people to root for the team and gives sports fans another reason to root for said team. The football version of this is college football: instead of (or in addition to) rooting for the local NFL team, one can root for the team of one’s college, with which it’s easy to identify. (This is actually how I got into football in the first place.) Even those who didn’t attend college (e.g., 90% of the population of Alabama) can still root for their state’s flagship university’s football team (e.g., the Alabama Crimson Tide.) After all, their taxes are funding said football team (sort of.) This ease of identity association for college football teams makes football at least 40% better as a sport, IMO.
College basketball has a similar aura, except that people only care about college basketball if their school has a bad football team (e.g., Duke, Purdue, Indiana, Gonzaga, UNC, Michigan State, Michigan, etc.) For this reason, basketball does not warrant as high of a ranking as football in the ‘other factors’ category. Michigan’s football team is of course actually quite good at the moment but they’re still bad relative to the smack that Michigan fans talk (e.g., “revenge tour”.) Additionally, Michigan always somehow manages to lose to Ohio State in football, and as long as Michigan-OSU isn’t competitive, Michigan is still effectively a basketball school. Basketball is thus a secondary sport to football when it comes to identity factors.
Finally, soccer has the benefit of being the world’s only real international sport, which enables people to strongly identify with their nation’s national soccer team when the World Cup comes around. Additionally, soccer is essentially the only sport discussed here in which the women’s teams can be at least as big of a deal as the men’s teams (in the case of the US Women’s National Team, much more of a big deal), which also warrants strong ‘other factors’ consideration. I therefore give soccer the strongest consideration of any of these five sports on this metric.
The Rankings
| Weight | Physics | Elegance | Monotony | Other | TOTAL | ||||
| Football | 8 | 9 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 134 |
| Baseball | 8 | 8 | 6 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 0 | 132 |
| Basketball | 8 | 3 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 7 | 72 |
| Hockey | 8 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 108 |
| Soccer | 8 | 4 | 6 | 9 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 9 | 120 |
As you can see, I’ve weighted each factor by how important I think it is in a sport. My choice of weightings is one of the aspects of this post that is probably up for debate. So, if you’d like, you can click here to view/edit a Google Sheet containing a copy of these rankings and change the weightings to your taste.
Our final ranking of the five major team sports is therefore:
- Football
- Baseball
- Soccer
- Hockey
- Basketball
Honorable Mention: Ultimate Frisbee
Shameless promotion for ultimate frisbee here: having played it in college, I’ve found it to be superior to at least basketball, hockey, and soccer in how fun it is to play, superior to all of these sports in its gentle learning curve, and superior to most in elegance. No, it doesn’t have very interesting physical phenomena, and it’s somewhat physically monotonous, but as someone who is 5’11” and generally despises exercising outside of the context of actually playing sports, I find it to be a great way to able to apply some sports strategy and get some exercise without sacrificing my life (and/or brain) at the altar of athletic competition. Also, this is the only context in which I can make one-handed touchdown catches, so that’s something as well.
Honorable Mention 2: Rocket League
I generally get bored of video games pretty quickly, but one game that has managed to sustain my interest for much longer than most is Rocket League. Like soccer, it has a counterintuitive but compelling invariant (“don’t touch the ball with your hands” → “touch the ball with a fairly hard-to-drive car”), a corresponding strong degree of elegance, and even some ‘physical’ interest (you don’t get to control a flying car with rockets on it every day.) Also interestingly, it seems to be comparable to football in the degree to which scheme acts as a multiplier on the raw skill of players (it’s not an uncommon occurrence for two technically less-skilled players to beat two players of greater skill because of their superior schematic chemistry.) I would once again recommend Rocket League to those such as myself with neither the genetic predisposition nor the continued motivation to play ‘real’ sports competitively.
And there you have it: a definitive ranking of the five major team sports. Please direct hate mail to cruxcapacitorcontact[at]gmail dotcom, or impose your vitriol upon the world in the comments section below.