Professional sports is really a bunch of grown adults playing a children’s game and making millions by doing it. If you were to propose that idea to a television station, of course they would say no. Who would take time out of their day, and devote all their energy into a bunch of athletes playing a sport that one might have played as a child?
Yet of all the industries in the entire world, none even come close to surpassing the amount of money and time spent watching sports on television.
In all of the most watched television moments in history, sports has seven of the top 10 events ever, with the 2024 summer olympics reaching 5 billion viewers, the Cricket World Cup reaching 2 billion, and the Tour de France reaching 3.5 billion people.
It presents one of the most puzzling paradoxes humanity has engineered. So why exactly is it so popular?
For one, sports can provide a nostalgia of former childhood activities an adult may have partaken in. Take baseball for example: “The clean-cut grass, the epochal organ interwoven into the action, food only befitting of a ballpark…Each of these pastime familiarities remind baseball enthusiasts of the sights, smells, sounds, feelings, and social interactions which consistently accompany America’s favorite pastime,” according to a study conducted by ScienceReport.
In person sports offer a direct lens back into childhood, the innocence and worry free environment that baseball provides in person is a direct example of that.
Yet sports can’t only be experienced in person, nostalgia can’t answer why sports remains to be the most dominant live television ever.
The most probable reason is that sports provide a needed sense of victory that adults a lot of the time do not get. According to a Forbes article on the Psychology of a super-fan, emotionally devoting oneself to a team and that team winning is tricking your brain into rewarding yourself emotionally. The team winning brings joy and a sense of accomplishment and victory that daily life might not bring. For example, in 1950 most of Brazil was in poverty. There are little to no achievements worth celebrating, yet during the World Cup final 199,000 fans gathered into a stadium in hopes their team would win. Despite Brazil losing the game, there is little to no doubt that if they won, it would bring a national celebration to the country, with people temporarily gaining a rare joy for the time period.
This leads into my other point. Sports outreach on television is so large that it creates an international sense of community that regular life otherwise might not offer, even in grief. Take the curse of the Bambino. For 86 years the Boston Red Sox could not win a World Series, and it tortured the fan base for generations. When they finally won in 2004, it brought true joy not just to the city of Boston, but to fans all across the country. A person could live in Los Angeles with no friends, but if they are a Red Sox fan, they join a community of people they have never met, but are considered family, because of a communal grief of losing.
The sense of community and victory is only possible because sports is broadcasted on live television, and the reason sports is successful on live television is because it strengthens the communal victory. It is a dynamic relationship that has managed to become the most successful live television event in the entire history of live television itself, even with the literal definition of live sports is adults watching other adults play a child’s game, creating one of the most unique human made relationships ever seen.
