Everything sounds beautifully, smoothly, and besides, the meaning is easily assimilated by the reader. At the same time, no one thinks: what is popularity, what is it expressed, who and how measures it? In addition, if a passerby met by chance to explain the popularity of a particular sport, then at best a person will start talking about attendance, TV ratings. In the worst case (which is more likely), he will stop at the first word, since earlier we never thought like that.
So what is popularity?
Past publications of this blog were devoted to the Football Development Index, which was developed by the Center for Strategic Studies in Sport. This material reveals the results of the calculation of the second criteria group of the index, the popularity of football.
For the first edition of the index, popularity was characterized by three indicators:
The mass football
Attendance of the highest football league
Number of clubs (professional and amateur)
Popularity index
Again, if there were more criteria, then the model would be more objective. However, you need to understand that we collect data for all 209 FIFA countries. Consequently, the first edition used data that could be found for all or most countries. From the Football news you will be having the best deals.
The mass football: the islanders ahead of the rest
Football is one of the most affordable sports. There is a ball and a conventional gate framework – the match will already take place. Therefore, football is considered to be one of the most popular sports in the world. It is logical that people will not play a game that they are not interested in. Hence the mass can very accurately determine the popularity of any sport. However, the question again arises of displaying this abstract term in quantitative terms.
If the mass implies the involvement of the population in this sport, then it is logical to measure the football mass in the number of people playing football. Since the population of the countries, of course, varies worldwide, it was advisable to use not the absolute value of the number of people playing football, but their percentage ratio of the total population.
The mass football
By mass, Russia occupies only 128th place, ahead of the not very successful football powers. At the same time, the leading positions in this criterion are occupied by the majority of island states, whose names are not known to every excellent student in geography. The same Costa Rica, which stunned the whole world at the World Cup in Brazil, takes the third place deservedly, because every 5th citizen of the countries plays football.
Attendance of major league matches: in India and Canada, people go to football
Perhaps attendance at football matches is one of the most
accurate parameters of popularity. Hence, it is not meaningful and simply uninteresting to substantiate his presence in the calculation model.
