I became a baseball fan at the very end of the sixties and became aware of other sports in a significant way by 1971 or so. Now, I lived in Chicago, where we had one of each of the four current leagues plus an extra baseball team, but if you had asked me what the major sports leagues were I’d have had no hesitation saying baseball, the NBA, football, and hockey.
Some of the obituaries for David Stern, who died in January, give him a lot of credit for making the NBA a much bigger deal than it was when he started, and not just in the US. He also signed agreements to broadcast games all around the world.
I’d argue that college football is probably actually the fourth major sport, with NHL hockey being fifth.
Some teams in college football out earn all NHL teams- the highest earning NHL team (NY Rangers) would be 5th in CFB team revenue, and the 2nd highest earning NHL team (Montreal Canadiens) would be 12th.
Viewership is similarly high for CFB vs. the NFL.
That’s impossible, college athletes are amateur competitors and the college experience is all about getting an education! :rolleyes:
College FB is certainly very big in some of the deep south since many of those areas still don’t have the NFL. And it’s big in the Midwest. In the west and northeast it’s mostly less popular than the NFL outside of some schools like Penn State , USC, etc. .
Canadian kids don’t limit themselves to playing on ice–they’ll play anywhere they can delineate a playing area, with whatever presents itself to play with. A pair of boots can become a goal, and a tennis ball can become the puck (a lot bouncier, but it rolls better on non-ice surfaces). They’ll play in schoolyards, parking lots, and on the street. If they can’t play on ice, they’ll play anyway.
Yes, every kid would need a hockey stick, but kids’ hockey sticks are fairly inexpensive, and available at every sporting goods store. If kids (or their parents) can afford baseball bats and gloves, footballs, soccer balls, and the like, for pickup games in the schoolyard, then they can certainly afford hockey sticks.
Now, if American kids don’t want to play pickup hockey in the schoolyard, with makeshift equipment, except for hockey sticks, that’s fine; but a lack of ice, pro-quality equipment, nets, boards and so on, doesn’t present an obstacle to Canadian kids. It’s a cultural thing, I suppose.
The New York Times ran an article (paywall warning) a couple of weeks ago about how the increasing cost of equipment ($100-300 for composite sticks, a thousand bucks for skates), fees, travel and training is leading some Canadian families not to pursue serious youth hockey.
I was born (in Chicago) in 1959, and by the time I was old enough to know what was going on–say 1970–there was no question that the four major American professional team sports were baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. It didn’t have to be said; it was just understood. But sometimes it was said, anyway.
I lack the knowledge to say how much earlier this would have been the case. I would say that the four sports have been the most popular team sports at least since the 1920’s, but football and basketball at first were primarily high school and college games. Professional football and basketball didn’t come into their own until the Fifties and Sixties, respectively, so I would date the advent of the four major professional leagues to that time.
It’s true that the NBA of the late Seventies, as others have noted, was small beer compared to what it later became. But, so was every other sport. The NBA, even then, was big time compared to any team sport outside of the big four.
Boxing suffered because they had different champions even in the same weight class. It seems now that MMA/UFC is a lot more popular and is on TV a lot. Horse racing lost popularity partly due to many more ways to gamble now. And there are not many tracks outside big cities and the TV coverage is minimal outside the 3 triple crown races.
NBA per game attendance had been gradually climbing from the 1960s on, not every year but the trend was upward for a long time. It was in the mid 1980s that it suddenlty started climbing FAST.
While that does coincide with David Stern (he started as commish in 1984) it also coincides with the ascendancy of Michael Jordan, the most important star in the sport’s history. It also coincides with a general growth in the pro sports business in the 1980s; baseball also grew a lot at the same time, seeing 30% attendance growth from 1980 to 1989 without any equivalent star. The NHL grew by about 15%. There was just a lot more consumer spending at that time.
Boxing has done more or less everything in its power to make itself less popular. Having multiple champions is a huge problem; there was once a day when the world heavyweight champion was without any question the world’s most famous heavyweight. Everyone, even non-sports fans, knew who it was. Men like Muhammad Ali, Jack Dempsey and Mike Tyson towered over sport. My father, a white guy from Canada, loved Muhammad Ali; my grandfather, also a white guy from Canada, was convinced Joe Louis was the greatest athlete who ever lived. Now I don’t know who the various champions are without looking it up. (Right now it’s either Anthony Joshua or Tyson Fury, neither of whom I would recognize if I met them in person.)
Boxing torpedoed itself in a lot of other ways too. Championship bouts became rare, and they can 't be watched without a tremendous amount of difficulty.
It remains really popular in some countries, but they’ve totally screwed it up in the USA.
Not only that, the sanctioning organizations were seen as majorly corrupt.
If boxing could go to a tournament to determine its champions, I think that would help with legitimacy. That would be tough logistically, though.
Another thing hurting boxing is that anyone under 40 did not grow up watching boxing. It was bad enough when they went to HBO and Showtime, but now any fight worth watching is on Pay Per View. This enables large paydays but shuts out the casual fan.
Would be interesting to see the numbers for boxing and horse racing in the past, or for college football/hoops now.
Well, for baseball, you need at least half as many mitts as players… Which is why this Chicago boy always favored 16"! 
In grade school in the early 70s, we had no impediment to playing street hockey all the time. Most kids had multiple sticks w/ plastic blades. Lack of equipment was no impediment.
Most mornings I skim newspapers from 100 years ago today, and baseball, boxing, and horse racing were the “big three” from at least 1913 until the “present” (1920). Baseball is king, and even then there is a sense that it already has a long history. Like, I’ll see stories from old-timers who played in the '80s and '90s (the 1890s) reminiscing about how it was back in the day.
Professional football isn’t a thing yet, the NFL not being founded until August “this” year. College football is reasonably popular though, just outside the big three. The dominant teams are in the Ivy League. There is very little mention of basketball and hockey at all, at least in the New York City papers.
(A side note, I’ll sometimes catch myself thinking and talking about things from 100 years ago as though they are current events. When the big Dempsey-Willard bout was announced last year (1919), I genuinely looked forward to it.)
It would but it’s astoundingly hard to figure it out. Boxing and horse racing, of course, do not have the advantage of having a small, discrete number of teams whose summed revenues can be easily independently approximated.
NCAA sports is odd in that while all NCAA teams are technically a “league” it doesn’t really work that way. I think there’s like 300 college football teams, and obviously the per team average revenue will not compare to an NHL or NBA team even if the total might be comparable. Some teams, like the Michigan State Wolverines, make more than some pro sports franchises, but some like the South Dakota Jackrabbits are probably holding bake sales.
According to the NCAA, literally ALL their sports made about $10 billion in gross revenue in 2018, but that represented a total loss because athletics in total cost $18 billion, the balance of which was presumably made up by student fees, donations from alumni, and whatnot. Major programs - LSU football, North Carolina basketball - are profitable, and prop up stuff like the diving team, but for the NCAA as a whole athletics are not remotely close to being a profitable enterprise, and I doubt they would be even if you narrowed it down to football or basketball. Top programs are, but the “league” is not.
So while the total revenue from NCAA football is probably as much as the NHL, or close to it, it seems kind of odd to suggest it’s truly on the same level when the NHL is doing it with just 31 teams and has to make a profit to stay afloat, while the NCAA as an entire unit doesn’t make a profit and doesn’t have to.
Yeah - NCAA and college sports are a total scam - and impenetrable. I only mentioned college hoops because I think I read something about the astounding $$$ involved in March Madness TV rights.
NCAA FB is dominated by the Power 5 leagues - ACC, SEC, Big 12, Big 10 and PAC 12, around 55 teams. the other division 1 teams are a few notches lower in terms of money and TV games. Division II and III FB is small schools and they make very little money and almost nothing from TV.
Division 1 college hoops has around 312 teams and the big tourney now takes 68 teams so smaller teams can make it by winning their conference.
Smaller teams could ALWAYS make the tournament by winning their conference. The expansion of the tournament in 1975 allowed Alabama, Kansas State, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico State, Oregon State, and San Diego State to participate.
There are currently 65 college football teams considered top level, but overall there are 670 college football teams in the NCAA. Also, Michigan State is the Spartans, while Michigan is the Wolverines.
Y’know, on thinking about it… If you asked me, “What are the four major American sports?”, sure, I wouldn’t have any doubt that you meant football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. But if you’d instead asked for the “three major sports”, I similarly wouldn’t hesitate to say football, baseball, and basketball. Or two, or probably even five (adding soccer, which isn’t watched much but is played a lot). Only if you asked for the single biggest, or the top six or more, would I be unsure.