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Comment by simmanian | Hacker News Reader

>I think eSports, particularly DOTA2's TI is far, far more relevant to young men than Football

I cannot disagree more. NFL is the biggest sports league in the entire world by revenue by far, even though it's only played within the United States! More and more people are playing video games, but eSports is still a very niche market. You certainly don't see people talking about a DOTA championship match as much as people talking about the Superbowl game on social media. eSports still has a long way to go in terms of general acceptance and social influence.

edit: changed "sports" to "sports league" after seeing some feedback

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Well, the original commenter overstated the importance of eSports, but you're overstating the appeal of American Football.

The global sports are probably soccer, and basketball, in that order. And even those are only because they are the cheapest to play. Just need a ball and a goal. I think this appeal is reflected in global revenue, and certainly in participation, outside of US. I'm pretty sure it's soccer by far.

  you're overstating the appeal of American Football

He didn't refer to "appeal" on an aesthetic level. He wrote of revenue.

NFL in-person attendance is spiraling downward. Don't look at published attendance figures based on "tickets issued"; look at video of actual butts in the stands.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-nfl-made-13-billion-la...

This article says otherwise, but who knows, maybe it's wrong.

That article states that globally Soccer makes more money than the NFL. Just adding up the 5 Soccer leagues listed in the top 10 there, they total more than the NFL. And there are a bunch of soccer leagues globally that aren't in the top 10. So while the NFL does have a commanding lead as the largest sports league globally, American Football is indeed behind Soccer globally as a sport.

Another way of thinking about why that is is that the NFL is effectively a monopoly. They are the only game in town for a sport which is only popular in one country (the USA). Soccer is, globally, a much more popular sport than American Football, but it's not controlled by a single league (FIFA is a governing body (a terribly corrupt one, but that's a separate conversation), not a league).

If you look at it per-capita, the NFL also seems a bit less impressive, and their revenue might be more a result of the fact that the USA is both rich and fairly large than any strong indicator of global popularity. Taking population estimates from Wikipedia, the NFL made roughly $39.76/person in the USA, and the Premier League made roughly $80.30/person in the UK. (And that methodology is arguably a bit generous to the the NFL, since the Premier League is technically only in England, but I'm including the rest of the UK since they also do watch a lot of Soccer AFAIK.)

To me the enormous revenues of the NFL is a stronger indicator of why monopolies are harmful than of any special virtues of the NFL or American Football.

Also, nobody outside of USA actually likes American football as a sport. There is no global appeal to the sport.

Let us not forget Canada!

"I don't even know what street Canada is on."

-- Al Capone

Mostly true but you should then take college football revenue in the US into account.

Interesting point but I'm not sure I agree. There are other professional soccer leagues in the UK aside from the Premier League as well. It's not entirely apples-to-apples because the wider market structures are different between the US & UK, but I do think comparing the dominant player in each market is useful & instructive.

I think your point is totally fair though in that my description of NFL as a monopoly isn't as comprehensive as I expected. From what I can find, CFL revenues are about $213M , and US college football is $3.4 billion. CFL is pretty close to being a rounding error compared to the NFL, but college football is a definitely a significant presence. I think I'd say a market where one entrant commands almost 80% of the revenue is pretty close to being a functional monopoly, but not entirely, so I should have accounted for that.

And the CFL as well.

There's a massive difference between revenue and viewership. Also, these figures are a bit weird since they are just based on the "NFL" company, which is pretty much the ONLY provider of American Football in the world, this says a lot in itself. There is obviously much more money spent on Cricket and Soccer than on American Football totally.

Check out this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-watched_televisio...

NFL doesn't come anywhere near the amount of viewers for soccer or even cricket OR badminton.

BILLIONS of people watch the World Cup and Olympics, the super bowl attracts about 115M. The soccer world cup had 3.5 BILLION.

Do you really think more people spend money on the NFL than the total world spend on soccer?

  BILLIONS of people watch the World Cup and Olympics, the super bowl attracts about 115M

The Super Bowl is one event. World Cup is dozens of events. The Olympics are hundreds of events.

I don't know man?

I think this is just saying which league has the most revenue. I'd find it very difficult to believe that the number of people who played American Football professionally and recreationally was anywhere even close to the number of people who played soccer on this planet last year. I'd be pretty confident betting that the number of people who play basketball on this planet dwarfs the number of people who play American Football. (And the number of people with an interest in soccer or basketball on this planet definitely dwarfs the number of people interested in American Football.)

Maybe American Football can make a lot of money because it is in a rich market? Not really sure. But you can't really argue soccer and basketball as the global sports. It's not even close.

Add up all the “Association football” from here and it’s huge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_....

Soccer is a much larger sport by revenue globally. It’s simply split into different nations + an international competition. The US is a single market so if you split things by country it tends to win.

PS: The World Cup is based on the best national teams vs using each individual team. Much like the US men’s basketball team at the Olympics vs NBA.

Yeah, I was talking about specific leagues, not sports entirely. My original post was misleading.

Tbh, when you said "biggest sports" I didn't think you were looking for "league with most revenue", might explain some of the reactions.

Yeah I am not sure about the NFL being the biggest in the world, but I got a bit of a laugh out of eSports being more relevant. People forget eSports is decades old now at this point, and the pinnacle of the eSports world is Korea where it has just now caught up to even challenge traditional sports such as Soccer. In America, there is still a way's to go.

"Activate (www.activate.com) projects that in the United States eSports will have more viewers than every professional sports league but the NFL by 2021" and will need to more than double viewership to topple the NFL.

And if you consider "traditional sports" holistically like they are treating "eSports" it is more fair to consider NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS viewership together, of which have large non-overlapping segments, then the gap becomes more of a chasm.

Riot released viewership total for the Worlds finals a couple months ago, and viewership in NA was significantly down than the previous year. In fact in almost every eSport viewership figure, if you discount Chinese and Korean viewership, the rest is almost insignificant -- an MLB playoff game attracts more viewers. I will say we are in the twilight years of the NFL, but what is more likely is that another physical sport topples the NFL throne rather than an eSport.

Unannotated numbers and trends don't tell you much when you're talking about this sort of demographic. I'd have to see a cumulative flow diagram showing breakdown by age range over time to have a shot at having an intelligent conversation about this.

Products that are associated with a certain age group by dint of biology (eg, bifocals) will constantly see an influx of new customers, so you just have to project population distributions.

I don't think people 'find football' when they get older. It was a thing when they were a kid, maybe they have watched the whole time, or maybe in a fit of nostalgia they're back. If the latter is a phenomenon, then high school and college football are your gateway to keeping the numbers up (and haven't they, or at least colleges, imposed tougher concussion guidelines?), otherwise the fanbase may be shrinking even though the graph says things are looking up.

> I'd have to see a cumulative flow diagram showing breakdown by age range over time to have a shot at having an intelligent conversation about this

You have a very high standard for having intelligent conversations, then. Sometimes the data you ask is not easily obtainable, behind paywalls, or just not presented uniformly. How about some good old fashioned "good faith"? Let's assume that both parties in this argument are indifferent to being right, but trying to sort out to find the truth of the matter, and they aren't pulling numbers out of their ass, how does that sound?

> I don't think people 'find football' when they get older.

I admit this is probably not the best metric, but a frequent viewer of /r/nfl and the various team based subreddits at least hints that the opposite is true: many people are finding football later in life.

Another thing left out of this conversation all together is the NFL's focus on expanding internationally -- particularly the UK and Mexico. Viewership in London especially continues to rise Y.O.Y, and the NFL has been floating the serious idea of a London based team for a few years now, and I fully expect that to happen within the next couple of years.

What's better: 15 million viewers 17 days a year or 300k viewers 365 days a year?

1 viewer who gets the channel anyway and has social pressure to watch, or 1 viewer who goes out of his way to pay to watch something on his own?

I think there is far more nuance to trendiness than the story told by a Nielson Rating System calculated decades ago.

What eSport gets 300k viewers 365 days a year?

Maybe apples and oranges. Only 2 football teams get 15 million viewers one Sunday a year and it's a good bet it won't be the same two next year. As a national advertiser that's a big deal but if you've been supporting that team all year it's not as big of a benefit to you, and if you've been supporting a team that didn't go then it's less than useless.

For football, you have English Premier League games, La Liga games, Italian Premier League games, etc, etc...

And at least EPL is watched all across the Europe, from Spain to Russia. For multinational advertisers, football is a boon, esports is not in a same league (pun intended).

Does a youtube channel count? Eyeballs mean very little if youtube payrates are to be believed.

I think video games have a bigger tent and offer opportunity for notoriety and even celebrity to way more young people than American football. American football is one of the most exclusionary school sports that exists.

I don't have data on this, but it feels to me that young people, particularly boys, are more interested in playing minecraft or fortnite and watching streamer videos of either game than high school, college or professional football.

And it makes sense because it doesn't matter how big you are or whether you can hang in a locker room or what you look like or what gender you are--what matters is you can play a game well or with style.

There are also more opportunities around eSports for young people in that they bundle in cosplay, artwork and even creating training videos and blogs are wide open opportunities to participate at little to no cost and regardless of physical capability.

Revenue is not a forward indicator of relevance. If anything it shows what _was previously_ important because this year's bowl game was a 10-year low in ratings.[1] Meanwhile, Twitch has more viewership than CNN or MSNBC. [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/feb/04/super-bowl-tv-... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/30/the-rise-of-esports-as-a-...

> NFL is the biggest sports in the entire world by revenue by far

Source on this? I can't imagine this being true compared to soccer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_le...

NFL had €11,394 million (over eleven billion Euro) in revenue in 2017 whereas the Premier League had €5,340 million (over five billion Euro) in revenue for 2016–17.

MLB and the NBA also beat out the Premier League in revenue.

EDIT: OK, OK, I thought the GP was talking about sports LEAGUES not NFL vs sports as a whole. I read "sports league."

The NFL is the biggest LEAGUE by revenue, but soccer is by far the bigger SPORT. Just add up the revenues from all the national leagues. To my knowledge, there is only one other professional league in the world (in Canada) that plays (more or less) the same sport as the NFL.

NFL is also used as a shortcut for a sport as it’s got different rules than high school or college football, and the both share a name with Soccer.

Rulesets aren't what bound a "sport".

Define something else that does.

Now, you may call something very similar the same sport, but a 100m vs 400m sprints are really different races even with just one slightly different number.

You're confusing event with category.

NFL and NCAA Football are different events, but the same sport. 100m and 400m races are different events, same sport.

You play chess and checkers on the same board but they are different games. The rules are extremely different between the NFL and NCAA.

People discuss the “NBA’s” 24 shot clock vs the NCAA’s more leisurely 35 seconds which among other things has a dramatic difference in how the two different games are played. Which was my original point, when the only people using a set of rules are in one org the names become interchangeable.

If you never compete it’s not clear how seemingly subtle rule changes have dramic impact. This changes not only game strategy but also things like how far people travel over the course of the game. 400m at a full sprint takes real endurance where 100m is mostly about acceleration.

Top athletes may have many skills that crossover to different sports, but these are very different games.

This is a dumb conversation. Basketball is basketball if there's a smaller (womens) ball or larger (mens) ball.

Football is football if you touch one foot inbounds or two.

You're clearly trolling, please leave me alone.

Calling something Dumb does not win an argument.

Is flag football still football becase it’s got a similar name?

Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling are separated at the olimpics. Even though they share the “wrestling” tile and just have different rules.

Clearly, people have different full names for the different types of football becase they are different sports. Which need somewhat different training and different reflexes.

This isn't an argument, you are wrong on the facts. The definition of the word, in English, isn't what you say it is. It is dumb to pretend otherwise, because you are not able to communicate with others who speak English if you do.

I left Reddit to avoid this kind of drivel, go back there if you want to continue to perpetrate it.

If you really believe that is true, find some actual evidence beyond gut assertions to support it.

The difference between HN and Reddit is not just being polite, it’s about productive arguments backed up by evidence rather than simply relying on believing something to be true.

This isn't an argument, you are factually incorrect. You are misrepresenting the definition of "sport", and to disprove that, all anyone has to do is look up the definition of the word "sport", or have had a conversation with anyone else about sports at any point in their lifetimes.

No one, and I mean literally no one, thinks of NCAA football and the NFL as two separate sports; they're both football, with different rules, a fact you already know but are refusing to acknowledge because you're trolling.

Your insistence on some kind of "evidence" for what the word "sport" means is just you trying to get me to do work that you yourself could do, because that's what trolls do -- they waste the time of others for their own amusement.

If you actually look up sport you end up with something like:

“an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” The first thing google returns. Which does not support your argument. Saying some arbitrary dictionary is enough is not evendence when they don’t actually say what you want.

I could go off and find quotes relating to the NCAA vs professional sports saying thing a like ~”Rules define the game, different rules different games.” But doing so is a waste of time when they don’t counter an argument.

As you need to be specific before I can counter or there is no way to move forward. Specific examples like the overtime rules are never going to counter your vague and baseless assertions so it’s pointless for me to keep responding to someone either trolling or just rather confused.

Willfully picking the inapplicable definition, then lying about the fact that it doesn't support what I've been saying is troll behavior, friend.

If you look at the wikipedia page for "Sport", you see all kinds of instances of the word "sport" being used in a way completely incompatible with your view. Please go away now.

The Premier League is one league in a country of fewer than 70 million people. Try adding up all the leagues across Europe for a fairer comparison. Then it's no contest - football (the one played with feet) takes it

I thought the claim was the NFL was the "biggest" sports LEAGUE in the world not "biggest" sport - "NFL" isn't a sport, it's a sports league. The NFL isn't the only American football league and I even heard that Vince McMahon is thinking about reviving XFL;. EDIT: Vince McMahon is planning on reviving the XFL in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL_(2020)#Revival

College football is huge. Arena football is popular as well.

"Soccer" brings in more revenue American football, baseball, and basketball....combined.

This article's 5 years old, but still relevant: https://mic.com/articles/91009/soccer-s-global-dominance-of-...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-nfl-made-13-billion-la...

It's not. ~NFL = ~Champions League.

Why are you measuring by revenue and not by viewership?

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