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Popularity of sports.

The most popular sport in the world is undoubtedly football/soccer, which is why FIFA has more members than the United Nations. The second biggest sport in the world, due to it's large following in India, is cricket. But looking at registered players' numbers that I got from various sources including Wikipedia & the FIBA website , I find that volleyball is the most participated in/played sport in the word with around 998 million registered players & badminton has 200 million. To me, this means the average volleyball player would need to be around five times better at their sport than an average badminton player at badminton to reach similar amounts of success. 


The Top 5 list:
  • 1) 998 million - Volleyball
  • 2) 400 million - Basketball
  • 3) 300 million - Table Tennis
  • 4) 242 million - Soccer
  • 5) 200 million - Badminton 

In South Africa, we live under the illusion that the national rugby team is more successful than the national football team. This is obviously an unfair comparison because football is probably much more competitive globally & has more registered players while rugby is not even in the top ten most participated in sports by number of registered players. How much more competitive is football compared to rugby? Rugby is said to have a 6,6 million registered players while soccer has over 240 million (240 m ÷ 6,6 m = 36.36364). The maths says that the average footballer needs to be 36 times better at their sport to achieve the same kind of success as the average rugby player. Remember this, there are 32 teams in the FIFA World Cup, which means by simply qualifying for it is more than the equivalent of winning the Webb Ellis Trophy of the IRB Rugby World Cup. Bafana Bafana have qualified TWICE for the FIFA World Cup, in 1998 & 2002. Among other achievements is Bafana Bafana winning the African Cup of Nations in 1996, beating World Champions on two or three occasions. This should more than count considering that you need to be approximately 36 times better as a player in football to be a professional than the average rugby player would need to be good at rugby. Adding the fact that there are only twenty participants in the IRB Rugby World Cup simply seals the deal. By comparison, Bafana Bafana would be FIVE-TIME World Champions in the rugby world. We must think about this next time we compare our national sports teams.
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