By “sport” I mean something that has a governing body, formal recognised competitions and official rules.
By “official rules” I’m including the actual in-game rules but also any constraints that apply to the activities of the teams or players.
By “complicated” I mean… well, you can make your own minds up about that.
I suspect that Formula 1 might be the most complex, given all the regulations that apply to the cars, testing etc.
No idea on which sport might have the least complex rules, but I’m curious.
Obviously Calvinball. I understand it doesn’t have a governing body, etc., but that wouldn’t be allowed under it’s rules.
Cross-country is pretty simple. Track and field a bit more so on the field events side.
I made this up decades ago to explain why I like racing. Yeah, I was not a win-win kinda guy.
"At its most basic, racing has only 2 rules."
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We start here - we finish there.
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The first one there wins - everyone else loses.
But as you point out, the devil is in the details.
Most complicated - arguably American football, especially at the NFL level.
Least complicated - maybe soccer? (with the exception of the offsides rule.) In fact, the reason soccer is so popular globally is because it’s so simple, intuitive and hassle-free.
NASCAR for least? Put the pedal to the metal and keep turning left.
What could possibly be simpler than the 100 meter dash?
Bowling doesn’t have too many rules, as I recall.
Don’t go over the line.
NASCAR (and most auto racing leagues) has considerable rules around the cars themselves, as well as rules that must be followed during races, such as behavior during yellow and red flags, behavior of the pit crew, etc.
I know, it was just a jokey answer. A local morning radio guy (now retired) used to say it all the time to needle his fans, many of which were also NASCAR fans.
For most complicated that is sure to be Three Cornered Pitney.
This is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Like @running_coach and @suranyi, my instinct says running - track, or cross country, or ultramarathoning, since it’s so fundamentally simple: get from here, to there, as fast as you can. But those sports still have rules, about shoes and nutrition and permitted drinks, about when runners can break for the inside lanes, mandatory drug tests, etc. Ultramarathoning adds in rules about required equipment and limits to where and when a runner can be assisted by crew. So maybe running might not be the least complicated.
Of the sports that I’ve watched enough to look things up in the rule book (baseball, football, basketball, and to a lesser extent hockey and soccer) I would rate American football (either NFL or college) as by far the most complicated.
There are not only a huge number of penalties that have to be defined, but pages and pages on penalty enforcement (as for example when three penalties occur at different times during the same play.) The rules themselves are supplemented by many pages of “interpretations” to illustrate how they work.
I’m thinking tennis is pretty simple, rule-wise.
mmm
Darts is very straightforward. Throw 3 darts at a board, score according to where they land (and stay) in said board. Start on 501 pts and work down to 0, finishing with a double or the Bull. Stand behind the oche.
Rugby has always baffled me, as a casual fan who watches the odd few 6 Nations and World Cup matches.
I was a volleyball referee years ago, and that was surprisingly complicated even before changes were eventually made allowing the libero player and some other stuff.
The refs have to keep track of a lot of stuff - the serving order, the position of the players irrespective of serving, front and back row players and where they can hit from, number of ball contacts on the play (which is not as straightforward as you might think), whether a ball has been touched or not on the block…
There were also a lot of judgement calls. Whether a setter has “lifted / carried” the ball or made a double-contact is pretty damn subtle. And a lot of court etiquette. Only the on-court captain can address the ref, and only about certain things.
Then they made a rule change that added further discretion - it used to be any player touching the net stopped the play, period. Then it was changed to whether the net contact was “incidental” or not. So whereas the call used to be cut and dry, now the refs had to make a judgement about whether to call a net contact (which needn’t be with the body, it could also be the uniform).
I found I didn’t enjoy it. Starting at the college level (or at good high school programs) a lot of volleyball strategy is simply getting around the court positions. Meaning, irrespective of where they begin on the court, moving your blockers to the net and passers to where they will receive and dig on defense. Hence all the weird positions for receiving serves in which the setter gets hidden behind people. I thought, if they were smart, volleyball governing bodies should have just had everyone serve in turn and play a fixed position on the court. It would obviate the need for all that rigamarole and make the ref’s job easier too. And never mind that libero crap.
They took an elegant game and massively over-complicated it. It’s a big part of why beach volleyball is more fun for everyone.
Edit: I’d also nominate baseball for being very complicated. I have a friend from Europe, who obviously didn’t grow up with baseball the way I did. I never realized how I had internalized the rules just through that familiarity. Trying to explain basic baseball to him was like teaching my cat about manual transmissions.
Sumo seems very straight forward.
The simplest is probably an individual sport, since there won’t be any rules about salary caps, how the roster must be built, how substitutions work, the draft, trading players, etc.
Don’t forget the basics-- The rules of a game don’t just include the “don’t do this or you’ll get a penalty” bits; they also describe things like how the game is scored, or how the field is set up. And that can get pretty complicated for some games. Take bowling, for instance: In a simplified version of bowling, you’d set up all of the pins, roll the ball towards them, and score a number of points equal to the number of pins knocked down. Then you’d set the pins up again and repeat. But instead, you get this thing where, if you knock down all the pins, then you also get more points on the next throw, or maybe two throws, depending on how well you do on those next throws. That’s a complication.