Baseball may be known as “America’s favorite pastime,” but new research suggests it’s not the country’s favorite sport anymore. A new survey from Pew Research Center reveals that football has taken the lead and it’s a big one.
The poll of 12-thousand U.S. adults asks, “If you had to choose one sport as being ‘America’s sport,’ even if you don’t personally follow it, which sport would it be?”
- Football tops the list with 53%, with baseball in a distant second with just 27%. Next is basketball (8%), soccer (3%), auto racing (3%), hockey (1%) and everything else (2%).
- When asked to write in another sport, the most common answers were golf, boxing, rodeo and ice skating. Some more creative answers include “competitive eating,” “grievance politics,” “reality TV” and “cow tipping.”
- There are some demographic differences for specific sports. White Americans were more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to choose baseball. Hispanic Americans were more likely to choose soccer, while both Black and Asian Americans were more likely to say America’s sport is basketball. But the biggest share of people in each of these groups say the national sport is football.
- But just because people see football as America’s sport doesn’t mean they’ve been closely following the NFL season. Nearly two-thirds (62%) say they don't follow professional or college sports too closely and 63% say they only talk about sports with other people a few times a month or less often. Only 7% of adults consider themselves sports “superfans,” those who follow sports extremely or very closely and talk about sports with others every single day.
Source: Yahoo Sports