Taking it seriously and being obsessed with winning strike me as being strong indicators of obsession.
To my mind a critically important measure is active participation. Your measures are solely focused on passive consumption. Participation matters too, at all levels, to ascertain obsession.
To use another sport as an example, the biggest national obsession I can think of with a sport is Jamaica’s obsession with sprinting. That obsession is measurable at EVERY level - it is a huge, huge spectator sport, but it’s also a huge participation sport. It’s also a huge investment sport; it’s where Jamaica sinks its time and money to develop talent. These things are manifested in Jamaica’s preposterously disproportionate dominance at the highest levels of competition. All those things have to be considered.
That’s a fair point. The OP didn’t specify obsession with football/soccer as a spectator sport or a participatory sport, so presumably both should be taken into account. Although it is possible, certainly on an individual level and probably also on a national level, to be obsessed with something as a spectator sport but not as a participatory sport, or vice versa.
Semi-serious answer: second Bundesliga, than third Bundesliga.
Serious answer: there’s truth in my above answer, those two minor football leagues draw more interest and spectators than almost any other sport. I don’t have the stats, but I guess the second biggest draws in league sports are (ice-)hockey and then handball, with basketball the runner-up. But no other sport comes close to “König Fußball” (King Football), like cricket, rugby or even snooker in England. I’d be curious if for any other football nation, this divide between the popularity of football and the next popular sport is as eminent as in Germany, but that’s impossible to really quantify.
ETA: and @Pardel-Lux is right. We take football much too seriously.
OK, using spectators and participants, I again support England’s case.
With a population of around 53 million, there are around 7,000 teams playing in orgainsed leagues.
And the number of spectators at just the top division (Premier League) over the 38 match season was 15 million.
For a comparison: Germany with 83 million has the DFB, which for a long time has been the biggest national football association with currently 7.2 million members and 24,000 clubs. I couldn’t find a statistic about the number of teams playing organized leagues, but my conservative number for teams per club IMHO is two, so Germany would have around 50,000 teams in organized leagues.
I oversaw the point about the number of spectators: well, the last few years the number of attendance in the Bundesliga declined, due to pandemic reasons, but the record season was 2018/19 with 13,295,405 spectators. Note that the Bundesliga has only 18 teams instead of the 20 Premier League teams, so there are only 306 games compared to 380. I’m now too lazy to compute the mean attendance , but it’s in the same ballpark
Oh absolutely. Americans love American football as a spectator sport to a far greater extent than they actually play it, but they play soccer more than they like to watch it. Obviously, in many countries, F1 drivers are huge sports heroes, but how many people race cars?
But if we’re gonna cite the MOST obsessed nation, surely it’s gotta be both.
I have no doubt that England is mostly a very football focused nation, but compared to some countries, like Brazil, where it’s literally the only sport anyone cares about, I just don’t think England can compete. I live in the South West of England, and it’s all about rugby here. Football is still popular, but there’s plenty of people who are only fair-weather fans when England are playing, or who don’t care at all.
, but it’s in the same ballpark