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Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

I know where the argument comes from, but at an extreme watching football with 22 folks running behind a ball in a slow game where 97% of the time nothing happens in terms of scoring, and in terms of tactics, today sounds like a handball game; it's boring (and I say that as a Brazilian and having attended more than 100+ in the stadium and more than 600 on TV).

The entertainment in the Olympic games is in the fact that those folks (especially track and field) go to the extreme and human limit. In other words, for regular sports entertainment, I can go to watch Green Bay Packers vs. Vikings or Chelsea vs. Manchester City; for olympic entertainment (athletes pushing to their limits), Olympics are the place to watch.

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What you say sounds logical, but it's nevertheless observably obviously wrong, and that's what's important.

All the figures bear out that people find football more entertaining than extreme feats. Maybe they like the slow pace and tension as it's more relatable to their own lives, or because the lulls in action allow some socializing or whatever.

Otherwise they'd spend their weekends watching hours of shark wrestling or whatever.

Or, hear me out, it's purely a cultural thing. Some communities are into hockey, wrestling, soccer, football etc. You could say the same thing about ski jumping, yet it's extremely popular in a few EU countries and pretty well funded. AFAIU barely anyone gave a shit about gymnastics in the US before Biles - if we have pipelines for young athletes to succeed, their sports can absolutely become regionally popular, sufficiently for them to be self sustainable through direct sponsorships.

Another example of this was chess with Bobby Fischer. Before Fischer there was minimal interest in chess on the US. But he caused a 3000%+ increase in membership of the US Chess Federation, to say nothing of casual players, and is largely responsible for the growth of chess in the US.

It can change really quickly too, with the top contenders coming from new countries. For example Polish population changed in 2001 from "what's skijumping?" to "skijumping is the new national sport" just because Adam Małysz won many medals and has a fun personality.

I think that popularity isn't random but comes from the region, and in those cases they are in fact paid well.

E.g. ice hockey in Canada, makes sense that people living in such a cold place are going to gravitate to such a sport.

EU countries - guessing those near the Alps right, not say Portugal? Biles - because it was their country winning. Outside of that they didn't care about the sport.

How do you pick a number as specific as 600? I have absolutely no idea how many football games I've ever watched.

Likely just napkin math of “I watch about one game every week, that’s roughly 50 games per year, so over the course of 12 years i should be around 600 games”

https://youtu.be/C29OU8Zu-sg

How is 600 more specific than any other number?

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