Please remind me of the team sports that were played at the original Olympics.
I’m here to ask a slightly different question from the OP. Was any global sport invented in the US? The only one I can think of is Basketball, and that by a Canadian. As to the people saying hockey originated in Canada - field hockey, or hockey, as the rest of the world knows it, is by far the older sport and originated in England. And I’d wager it’s much more global than ice hockey too.
Skateboarding? Frisbee?
Seriously, it depends on how you define “global” and “sport”. The OP requires “major” too, which probably limits it to sports that have already been mentioned.
Volleyball? Which is actually rather more popular outside the US now than it is here
There’s nothing in that article that says that NFL football is gaining in popularity. The Rams are not playing in England because there is demand for it, they’re playing there to try to create a demand.
It was a spectacular failure.
Come now, everybody knows that golf was invented by the hobbits.
It’s not gaining in popularity, no, but it’s not a complete flop, either. American football’s status in the UK is stable - it is a minority interest, but it’s not like it’s some obscure sport that nobody’s heard of. The popularity of the NFL games held in London testifies to that.
What happened was that there was basically no coverage of American football at all until the 1980s, when one of the networks started showing it. The novelty value made it something of a fad for a while. After that, it declined to a more sustainable level, and now, with far more channels available, it gets a reasonable amount of coverage and has a small but keen following.
WLAF / NFL Europe essentially existed for two reasons:
- To try to build interest in American / NFL football in Europe
- To act as a developmental league for marginal / prospect NFL players
On the first reason: some franchises did reasonably well, but others couldn’t draw fans, and franchises folded or moved pretty regularly. By the end, the league was almost exclusively based in Germany (and I’ve always suspected that at least part of the popularity in Germany was due to U.S. servicemen stationed there).
On the second reason: there were a couple of examples of players who parlayed their time in NFL Europe to becoming noteworthy players in the NFL, such as Kurt Warner. However, I suspect that there weren’t enough of those for the NFL to believe that continuing to operate (and fund) the European league was worthwhile.
What do you want, man? First you don’t specify team sports in the OP, then you come back and say you should have specified them, but that individual sports should also be considered. :smack:
Well he also said “major” and “global”. I would guess that chariot racing and Pankration don’t cut it.
In Australia we have the Melbourne Cup, a horse race. People pretend to be interested in horse racing for that one day of the year, because that’s what every one else is doing. Yet another excuse to drink too probably.
The Super Bowl is like that, albeit on a much, much smaller scale.
Yeah, but it is very late at night. It’s entertaining to the extent that a popular performer will be strangling the back catalogue for 15 minutes. Top sport, that. Prince was great though.
Native Americans invented lacrosse.
Kind of surprised this hasn’t come up yet. Motorsport is the most popular live spectator sport in the world (thanks to NASCAR). Two of the three major forms - point-to-point racing, and rallying- originated in France. Circuit racing originated in England.
It has come up. Post #5. 
I heard somewhere (not sure how accurate) that New Zealand has the most golf courses per capita of any nation in the world.
Some of us say that it’s overappreciation is only outshone by NASCAR:D
That’s not neccessarily true either - although the world’s oldest golf club is scottish
My best guess here would be Australian Rules Football.
To the best of my knowledge it’s not played to any significant extent outside Oz.
Games involving a ball have been played all over the place. Including in Europe, even though they might bear no ressemblance to modern sports (an example could be having two teams from different villages, and the team that could bring back the ball by whatever mean necesssary to its own village would win). Soccer, Rugby, etc… are all descendants of one version or another of those sports.
I think tennis is of French origin (from the “jeu de paume”) that used to be popular since the renaissance, and whose name imply it was itself derived from a game played without a racket, like the basque pelota, this probably making it a distant cousin of baseball.
I don’t think it’s really possible to define where a game was “invented” since there’s always a predecessor. Except if you mean the point in time and the place where a set of rules similar to what is used today has been formalized.